Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Computer Viruses

What is a computer virus, and why are they important?

A computer virus is a computer program that is self reproducing often designed to complete a damaging task. Computer viruses are intended to move from computer to computer. The name virus is directly related to how biological viruses in the human body travel; the basic function of the computer virus is the same as is biological viruses.

Computer viruses can be spread by email attachments, floppy disks, and Internet downloads/file transfers. It is not possible to spread computer viruses through email messages themselves. Recently, computer viruses have been created as part of a file such as a Microsoft Excel. Viruses can have a variety of harmful effects on computers.

All computers within the department labs are protected with the latest virus scanning software and the latest virus definitions. However, viruses come in many forms and may be newer than the protection.

Because of such cases users must take extreme caution when opening files from either known or unknown sources. If you receive an attachment that you were not expecting then it could have very well been sent from an infected system and be unknown to the user that sent the file. Please be careful when working with out side files or attachments.

Lab computers are updated remotely on a weekly basis or as the need arises. If a new virus is released in the wild we normally make the updates to the labs as soon as the protection updates are available.

Faculty and staff computers are updated automatically from the client and receive the updates weekly.

More Information

For more information about viruses visit http://nai.com or http://mcafee.com.