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A virus is a software program that can operative on your computer or files without your knowledge, often times doing malicious damage to your files. There are many types of viruses. Some simply attach to files and replicate when the file is used, while others damage or delete files, or affect system performance. There are more than 50,000 known viruses. Viruses can be spread through program or file downloading and trading. The virus attached to the downloaded program or file may have no knowledge of the attached virus. Some viruses are time-released, set to have an effect on a certain date or time. It has become common to attach viruses to files sent as attachments to e-mail, as was the case with the Love.Letter virus that affected 45 million email users in many countries around the world in May 2000.

As if worrying about real viruses isn't enough, along come the jokers who, fortunately for you, aren't malicious in their intent, but create virus hoaxes. Virus hoaxes are mostly spread via email. The email might emphatically states something like "Please read this and pass it on to as many people as possible immediately! If you get an email message with "blah, blah, blah" in the title, DO NOT OPEN IT - it will destroy your system".

The two best pieces of advice that we can pass on to you are: 1. get an antiviral program and keep it up to date; 2. if you get an email with a program attachment, make sure you know the origin - even if it looks like it's from a friend - before you open the attachment; 3. when you get email alerting you to a new virus, check it out first before propagating virus hoaxes.

Malicious programs on the other hand are not viruses, but can be equally damaging. They work mostly because the perpetrator breaches your trust. Be aware that any program that you run on your computer has the potential to collect data from your hard drive, crash your system, or install another program without you realizing. It would be very easy for a programmer to create a web page which has an executable program. you might be tricked into running the program, only to appear that it didn't work. However the program maliciously installed another program which allows the author of the malicious program to connect to your computer remotely. You should be careful to trust the source of any executable programs you run on your computer.

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