That sort of thing is not obvious, but it ends up being more pernicious. The damage caused by viruses is not limited to lost or corrupted data. Fixing an infected network requires professionals and can be extremely costly and time-consuming. One machine is no problem. A network requires a lot more time.
Viruses can also harm individuals on a more personal level.
If you e-mail someone with a virus, you end up looking like you don't know what you're doing. The fear of viruses can also have psychological affects on naive computer users. This fear can also prevent people from learning to use computers for more than e-mail and word processing, Burrell said. Once a Word document is infected with a macro-virus, it can spread to the Microsoft Word template. If the template becomes infected, any document opened by Word on that computer is at risk.