Hart Nat Hentoff David Horowitz Arianna Huffington Marianne Jennings Michael Kelly Mort Kondracke Ch. But that false sense of security probably lasted only until the Melissa virus surfaced last March, causing worldwide havoc.
Viruses are programs that can infect a personal computer and reproduce themselves inside it.
There are tens of thousands of known viruses on the loose, traveling rapidly via e-mail and the Internet, and spreading worldwide in a matter of days. A virus may quickly announce itself via a message on the screen, or it may lurk undetected for months. It may reproduce itself inside your computer, and you may unwittingly spread a virus as you share data with other computer users. The most destructive viruses can erase data on your hard drive, but the typical virus cannot harm hardware. To spot a virus, look for such things as unusual messages or sounds, windows on the desktop that suddenly appear and disappear, or programs that slow down or don't work properly.