

Early viruses, relying on floppy disks for transmission, spread quickly as infected data disks were shared around an office, or pirated software was passed around a playground.

At that point, the virus may make a copy of itself on the hard disk and continue to run, or it may only run each time the application is used. Viruses attach themselves to specific applications on a computer and are activated when the program is first run.

Viruses are said to be self-replicating programs and date back as far as the early 1970s, but they only became well known with the advent of microcomputers and later, the internet. The best-known type of malware is probably the virus although many pieces of malware are called viruses, they are nothing of the sort.Ī virus is a piece of software that has been written to insert copies of itself into applications and data and onto crucial parts of a computer’s data storage systems (e.g.
