What is a Virus?

[A_BULLET]

Hello there

I heard so many bad things about Viruses, but only had one that actually did anything visual to my Computer.
Can anybody explain to me why viruses are so bad and dangerous, cos i only get popups from my antivirus and then click clean computer and then its over. As mentioned only had one bad virus, shutdown winlogon.exe had to format, but that was with Win Xp and a antivirus which was updatet afew months ago.

hope to learn something

[Koko_Lion]

Some steal info like banking accounts others turn your pc into spam zombie. Not sure other than that.

[A_BULLET]

okay thats a beginning.
do viruses do anything else?

[-Prometheus-]

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[Siemens]

What are the stats again? well I think it's thousands of viruses are releashed each day. I just can't comprehend why thousands of people will each day make viruses which will most probably affect them too in some point in the future.

[Prime]

Technically a Virus is a piece of malicious code that can only be spread by users
A worm is a much higher level of malicious code designed to self replicate in the wild.
A trojan is a means of delivering a malicious payload through a back door.

Why people write them, frack knows. Good experiment in predator-prey algorythms though.

[KALSTER]

Why people write them, frack knows.

For all we know, the anti-virus companies write most of them themselves.

[-Prometheus-]

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[Siemens]

Lol, I recall the PCFormat article where it was fact that the big Anti virus companies are actually guilty of this.
Firefox + using your brain while surfing + Avast = minimal viruses

It baffles me how many of my friends on Facebook fall for the old "omg look at justin bieber pooping in his moms mouth" scams. It is actually quite embarasing from people you'd least expect