18 Facts About Computer virus

Computer virus is a type of computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting its own code.

Creeper Computer virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, in the early 1970s.

In 1982, a program called "Elk Cloner" was the first personal computer virus to appear "in the wild"—that is, outside the single computer or computer lab where it was created.

An article that describes "useful virus functionalities" was published by J B Gunn under the title "Use of virus functions to provide a virtual APL interpreter under user control" in 1984.

The first IBM PC Computer virus in the "wild" was a boot sector Computer virus dubbed Brain, created in 1986 by Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi in Lahore, Pakistan, reportedly to deter unauthorized copying of the software they had written.

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The Computer virus did not contain any Windows API calls, instead relying on DOS interrupts.

Computer virus generally contains three parts: the infection mechanism, which finds and infects new files, the trigger, which determines when to activate the payload, and the payload, which is the malicious code to execute.

Memory-resident virus installs itself as part of the operating system when executed, after which it remains in RAM from the time the computer is booted up to when it is shut down.

One method of evading signature detection is to use simple encryption to encipher the body of the Computer virus, leaving only the encryption module and a static cryptographic key in cleartext which does not change from one infection to the next.

An old but compact way will be the use of arithmetic operation like addition or subtraction and the use of logical conditions such as XORing, where each byte in a Computer virus is with a constant so that the exclusive-or operation had only to be repeated for decryption.

Some viruses, called polymorphic viruses, will employ a means of encryption inside an executable in which the virus is encrypted under certain events, such as the virus scanner being disabled for updates or the computer being rebooted.

For example, a virus can be programmed to mutate only slightly over time, or it can be programmed to refrain from mutating when it infects a file on a computer that already contains copies of the virus.

Power virus is a computer program that executes specific machine code to reach the maximum CPU power dissipation .

The Bliss Computer virus never became widespread, and remains chiefly a research curiosity.

AntiComputer virus software needs to be regularly updated to recognize the latest threats.

The first, and by far the most common method of Computer virus detection is using a list of Computer virus signature definitions.

Microsoft offers an optional free antiComputer virus utility called Microsoft Security Essentials, a Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool that is updated as part of the regular Windows update regime, and an older optional anti-malware tool Windows Defender that has been upgraded to an antiComputer virus product in Windows 8.

Term "Computer virus" is misused by extension to refer to other types of malware.