What is a "virus"?
A computer virus is not that unlike a virus that we get as humans. It's something that invades us, it's a germ and it's going to do something bad to us. There are many different types of computer viruses that range from viruses that enter you're computer lay dormant for a while and then when they come to life, they might send an e-mail to everyone that's in your address book, they might delete files that are on your computer. They basically wreak havoc in someway shape or form on your computer. Often time's viruses spread by lodging in a parasitic kind of way in a computer and attach themselves to e-mails that you send to other people. Or, they create an e-mail spree where they e-mail themselves to everyone in your address book, thus, spreading themselves to however many people you might have in your address book. Viruses can do a range of things to your computer from things that are more prank oriented and harmless to actually bringing your computer to a complete halt. So there's again a wide range of viruses and it's up to the creator to program what they do. But, it will range from just mischievous types of things like moving things around, changing names, sending harmless e-mails out to actually deleting files and starting to erode parts of your hard drive and starting to attack your system software and bring your computer to a halt. It was most popular that viruses were spread via e-mail, email attachments, and once you open that attachment the virus would then activate or you wouldn't have to open the virus and it would just activate. As more and more peer to peer activity is gaining activity such as downloading music and downloading games and sending instant messages, viruses are beginning to attach themselves to those forms of data transmission and by downloading a song you might also be downloading a virus.
