What is a Virus?

A virus is a small piece of software that hides in between computer files. A virus can be found in e-mail attachments, software files and on other media like cd, floppy disks, servers and web sites, where files are located that are exchanged between users.
Certain viruses are harmless, while others can do a lot of damage by wiping out hard disks or corrupting data. Mostly a virus spreads itself via e-mail. A worm is a very well-known type of virus that comes via e-mail as it spreads itself. The difference between a worm and a virus is that a worm’s major task is to spread itself as fast as possible through as many computers as possible and a virus is made to bring harm to other computers. So a combination of the two is the most dangerous combination as it will spread itself to as many computers as possible and inflicting damage.
Another version of viruses are the so called Trojan Horses as Back Orifice. A Trojan is a software that installs itself in your computer via e-mail and opens certain ports to the Internet so that an operator can get via these opened ports into your computer. You can get Trojan Horses mainly in porn e-mails and software you receive via e-mail.

What types of viruses are there?

Broadly you could categorize 4 types of viruses:

Macro Viruses:
These are the most common viruses. They infect an application, mostly Microsoft Excel and Word and they can make changes to your settings or even corrupt your software.

Software Viruses:
These types of viruses infect mostly .exe files as they are software applications. These viruses attach themselves to the software application and they execute at the moment you run the application.

Boot Sector Viruses:
This type of viruses infects the boot-sector of media like diskettes, hard disks and could transport easily. As soon as one of these files are used to start a computer the virus activates and starts doing it’s intended harm.

Web Site Viruses:
These types of viruses are mostly gotten from web sites and are also activated trough web servers. Some of these viruses can be very harmful for web servers as they can attach the data needed for clients to use disabling users to use the web server.

What types of groups are more affected by viruses?
As Viruses are made to impact as many people as possible the group targeted the most are the Microsoft Windows users as they are the largest.
Macintosh users are not that much targeted as that group is much smaller.
This is one of the reasons why the new operating system Linux is getting a lot of attention as there are practically no viruses at this time that affect Linux.

InterNeeds recommends:

A very strong recommendation for virus protection is the use of a e-mail software other than Outlook Express. Most viruses in the world are specially developed for Microsoft Outlook Express. A virus downloaded into Outlook Express starts almost automatically with its code execution.
We recommend Qualcomm Eudora for e-mailing as this software is very safe. When you download e-mail with Eudora, the attachments nor code will run automatically and Eudora will even deny special codes to run. You can download a free version of Eudora by going to our link page.

Is InterNeeds doing something about virus scanning?

InterNeeds has virus scanners for incoming and outgoing e-mails installed on the e-mail servers. If an InterNeeds customer receives a virus from someone the e-mail is quarantined in a special directory and the receiver receives an e-mail notifying the customer that a virus has been stopped from entering their computer. Tens of thousands of e-mails per day containing viruses are quarantined this way by our servers.
For more information about viruses you can go to the following sites where extensive information about virusses can be found:

Sophos

McAfee