Classification of Viruses. A Government Report from Gibb, McMillan and Wylie

An Introduction… A Virus is a program designed to attack, disable or hinder a computer’s processes. All the result of illegal computer programming, viruses often infect computers through and harmlessly duplicates itself throughout a contact list… Sometimes, the are more harmful and can delete files, render programs unusable. or even stop the computer loading up.

Macro Macro viruses are often sent as attachments along with a document, via . They are encoded as a macro, embedded into a document, which the receiver then opens, exposing the virus to their system. Well known programs, such as Microsoft Word, have powerful macro languages. Applications such as these allow macro to be embedded into a document. Once a macro virus has entered the system, it is able to embed itself into any new documents created with the application that has been infected. They are common viruses, but they normally cause words and sentences to appear in a document when they are not needed and not wanted.

Boot Sector Virus Boot sector viruses infect all drives on a computer (eg floppy, hard disk, CD). It lies in wait in an infected computer until uninfected boot sectors are connected to a computer.

File Virus Viruses are often classified according to the objects they infect. File viruses, as the name suggests, are designed to add their code to files (generally program files). What is a file virus? They are sometimes known as program viruses. Attaches itself from program files. When you run the infected program, the virus load into the memory. Most users innocently obtain file virus by downloading a program from the web or opening the attachment. A file virus is a file that infects other good files around it A ‘file virus’ is the most common virus of all. It usually searches for a particular file so it can destroy it. They know how to overwrite & affect the file that they are infecting “Hello its something that kills your files” – Benji