Computer Anti-Viruses

Anti-Viruses

The impact that computer viruses provide to this society is currently huge because the computer is a part of our lives. We depend on computer so much. Then, how did the computer viruses get popular and infamous? It is safe to say that viruses could not have been invented unless the access to Internet (World Wide Web) has got easy and popular for the people. Computers have made a big difference in today's way of life. Computers bring many positive affects that helps make everything simple. One negative affect that has haunted all computers has been viruses. Viruses can be very deadly to computers and it certainly brings out the worse in them. Everything the computer offers can be denied by just one virus.

Viruses have created a huge concern to all computer owners. Viruses tend to confuse the computer and cause great disasters. The definition of a virus is" a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer; "a true virus cannot spread to another computer without human assistance".

There has been a solution for computer viruses. Technology has expanded greatly that we now have answers to these viruses. Anti-viruses have been created to destroy viruses. Anti-viruses were first discovered in 1949 by a mathematician named John Von Neumann. John Von Neumann described viruses as "self-replicating programs which could resemble computer viruses as they are known today". However the first sign to discovering anti-viruses was in 1960. A group of programmers developed a game called Core Wars, which could reproduce every time it was run, and even saturate the memory of other players' computers. The creators of this game also created the first antivirus, an application named Reeper, which could destroy copies created by Core Wars. In November 2nd 1988 the infamous internet worm was released. Robert T. Morris, Jr. the first person charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, released the infamous "Internet Worm". This worm crashed over 6,000 computers online including machines at NASA, some major universities, and a number of military bases, which made the security of a computer, network a big issue and changed the public perception of computer threats. While the worm did not contain any code to