Most of us swap disks with friends and browse the Net looking for downloads. Rarely do we ever consider that we are also exchanging files with anyone and everyone who has ever handled them in the past. If that sounds like a warning about social diseases, it might as well be. Computer viruses are every bit as destructive, and come in a vast variety of strains. A computer virus tears up your hard drive and …showed first 75 words of 442 total…

…showed last 75 words of 442 total…incorporate code that specifically destroys data after the virus determines certain criteria have been met, that is, a date, or a certain number of replications. Many viruses do not do a good job of infecting other programs and end up corrupting, or making the program they are trying to infect completely unusable. The purpose of a virus, in many cases, is to infect as many files, with little or no noticeable difference to the user.