The most commonly recognized threat to computer safety is the virus. Though hardware failure is the topmost reason for data loss all over the world, most people link the terms ‘data loss’ and ‘virus’ together. The interesting thing is that viruses did not start as anything harmful, and are now, sometimes, either blown out of proportion or undermined as a threat. As it stands now, a virus is a programme written with the malicious intent of damaging, deleting or gaining illegal access to other people’s data. To begin with though, they were just harmless puzzles and games designed by computer geeks. However, with time, the virus writers woke up to possibilities offered by the commercial benefits of viruses. This happened in two ways. Firstly, the realization that viruses could be observed as a dangerous thing by huge number of users, especially home users, fuelled the desire to write them. Secondly, hackers and virus writers teamed up to enter the highly lucrative world of corporate digital espionage and theft. Today, writers of viruses are some of the best paid people in the world.

Who Writes Them?

The first criterion of writing a successful virus is that you should have your fingers on the pulse of what is being popularly done and accepted in the market. If you understand the consumer psychology well, you would be able to write a good virus, i.e. one that spreads quickly and easily. If the floppy is out of use, a virus that works with floppies is useless. On the other hand, if audio visual downloads and sharing are the new craze, then an ideal virus would be infesting popular social networks and get activated whenever anyone uploads or downloads a video clip. Obviously, the person concerned needs to be bright enough to write a competent programme using the relevant language. Those who write the virus also write the anti-virus, and are usually highly paid by corporate houses to do so. They may be students, housewives, engineers, programmers, just about anyone who has the competence to do it. A virus writer may first enter a contract with a company and start ‘working’ on the virus. On the other hand, he or she may do it precisely to draw attention to his or her skills, and treat it as ‘portfolio’.

What do they Do?

A virus is aimed at deleting, corrupting and gaining illegal access to programmes. The most usual method for the virus to adapt is to follow a loop and write itself over and over again on the disk / online space of the victim, wiping out all other information in the process. Sometimes, a virus may be aimed at attacking only specific files such as jpeg or mpeg or exe. In that case, these files suddenly get corrupted and refuse to open. A virus attack can make your Operating System or hard disk crash. It may also make the server crash in the case of a network. Viruses ‘staying’ in your inbox will send themselves with your mails, and may turn you into an unwitting virus vendor. The worst property of the virus is to spread and infect other people too. That is just why the anti-virus is so important today, and companies making anti-viruses are not just few, but also with multi billion turnovers.

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