With the advent of the Internet, the virus threats to your precious data have increased significantly.
Many of the virus threats in the recent past have made it to the news headlines. The famous Sobig virus that infected millions of computers had many business operations stalled. Such deadly computer viruses not only disrupt the normal course of operations, but are also responsible for businesses losing millions in downtime and recovery operations. We will discuss the nature and impact of Viruses, Worms, and Trojans in the following section.
Viruses
Viruses tend to attach themselves to an executable program or file. When this file is transferred to your computer and you run this program, the virus infects your computer. Most of the times the users are not even aware that a virus has infected their computer and their data. Consequently, when the user forwards this program to more users via mail or other means, the virus spreads itself rapidly.
Users are advised to open all email attachments with caution for this very reason. In fact, most of the viruses spread through email attachments. Dangerous as it may appear to be, the good part about viruses is that they can spread only with human action. Therefore, if you are cautious enough to not open any suspicious email attachment or program, you can save your data from getting infected.
Worms
Even though viruses can be very dangerous, companies these days may be more at risk due to worms than viruses. The business world of today is more of a virtual world wherein most of the transactions and business take place online. Most of the companies have their own servers to ensure that the online communication channel remains secure. Worms pose a huge threat to these servers.
Viruses, though may spread rapidly from one computer to another, do not have the ability to replicate themselves. Worms, on the other hand, replicate themselves rapidly when they spread from one computer to another. Due to this ability to replicate rapidly, worms tend to consume a lot of memory space in a very short duration of time. Therefore, it very easy for worms to create havoc in the computers, web servers, and network servers. Under such situations, the servers do not respond and the operations come to a standstill. Worms can completely or partly cause damage to your valuable data.
Trojans
Most users get tricked into activating a Trojan because it attaches itself to legitimate software or the user may think that it is coming from a legitimate person. When the user opens the seemingly harmless software, the Trojan deletes or destroys the valuable files on your computer. Malicious users such as hackers can gain access to your confidential data by using Trojans. Therefore, not only your data but the security of your data too may be at risk.
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