Most of us swap disks with friends and browse the Net looking for downloads. Rarely do we ever consider that we are also exchanging files with anyone and everyone who has ever handled them in the past. If that sounds like a warning about social diseases, it might as well be. Computer viruses are every bit as insidious and destructive, and come in a vast variety of strains. A computer virus tears up your hard drive and brings down your network. However, computer viruses are almost always curable diagnosed, and cures for new strains are usually just a matter of days, not months or years, away.
Virus, a program that 'infects' computer files (usually other executable programs) by inserting in those files' copies of itself. …