Computer viruses show how vulnerable computer systems are.
Viruses can be painful for the economy because there were cases when viruses were responsible for destroying millions of dollars in just a few seconds.
Viruses can damage your computer as well, they can lower your system's speed down, erase valuable information and you can even loose all your private data.
A virus is a small software that attaches itself to one of your programs and when you use that program the virus itself is turned on.
After that the virus starts to reproduce and attaches to other programs, infecting them too.
Then the computer is in danger and it spreads so fast that people can't even get a chance to react sometimes.
There are E-Mail Viruses as well.
E-Mail viruses are usually messages with a virus in an attachment, they replicate and send themselves to all your contacts if you open them.
They can infect your computer when the attachment is opened and sometimes they can even infect your computer when you just open that E-Mail without even downloading the attachment.
Trojan Horses are not rare at all in the virus world.
They are not software that spreads around leaching on programs, they are independent.
They can be in the form of a downloadable game, some small computer software or even a screen saver, but are known for erasing complete content of your hard drives.
Worms are yet another kind of viruses.
Worms use security holes and computer networks to replicate, and spread around.
After transferring to other machines a worm spreads around further by searching holes and copying itself.
You can protect yourself from viruses by using Anti-Virus programs.
Anti-Virus programs use firewalls to protect your computer from harming software.
They can also scan your drives for viruses.
When they find a virus on your system you get to chose to delete that file or move it to their chest.
The chests are places provided through these Anti-Virus programs where you can safe keep infected files so they can't spread around.
Viruses mostly attack system files and that could be a problem, because if you try to delete that file, sometimes you won't be able to do so and you could even mess up the system.
Viruses can be spread trough multimedia system too, like CDs, DVDs, USB drives, etc.
You should scan those with an Anti-Virus application first before you make use of them.
One other thing, do not open E-Mails from unknown senders, with executables in it, for example: .
jpg, .
com, .
exe, .
vbs, etc.
You should pay attention to which internet pages you visit because there are many unsafe internet pages that can harm you personal computer.
Some protection programs warn you before visiting unsafe internet pages.
If they do so, it is better not to visit these pages.
So, beware of the viruses, they are called that way because they have a lot of similarities to real viruses and they spread as fast as those.
There are some safer systems that can be used if you are constantly attacked by harmful software, or you just want to be safe.
UNIX is one system that can be used as a safe operating system and it offers great protection.
Remember to update databases of your Anti-Virus services frequently.