Virus Threats to Your Data

However, these days, there are certain programs that can help you write these viruses even if you have a little more than basic knowledge of computers. Let us understand a brief history of viruses to understand what viruses are and how they spread. Earlier, viruses were only capable of infecting a single PC. Virus writers started creating these viruses intentionally to harm certain businesses or individuals. Since the computer viruses used to be simple, they had the ability to attach and spread only identical copies of themselves either from one program to another or one disk to another disk. Therefore, since the virus completely replicated itself, it was easier for the anti-virus researcher to detect such viruses. The researcher had to merely detect a small sequence of bytes of the virus called a virus signature. Then this virus signature used to be added to the virus database and the anti-virus software used this database of signatures to match files containing similar signatures on the computer system. If any file contained similar signatures, these files could be easily detected and repaired making life simple for the user as well the anti-virus researcher. However, this detection method became known to the virus writers and they evolved a new virus, which was an encrypted virus capable of producing new viruses by varying the encryption key. This made things somewhat complicated for the anti-virus researchers because no longer was their task as simple as just detecting similar virus signatures. Nevertheless, these encrypted viruses still had a static component that did not change from infection to infection. This component along with decryption logic was useful enough for the anti-virus researchers to detect this new generation virus. There have been advancements in the nature of viruses that lead to the development of a more robust type of computer viruses called the stealth viruses. A stealth virus installs itself in the memory of the computer and intercepts the requests to scan or access infected files. Therefore, when a virus detection request is made by the anti-virus researcher, the virus immediately disinfects the infected file and provides the researcher with the file’s original contents. However, once the anti-virus run is completed, the virus re-infects the files and saves them back to the disk. This type of virus can be very damaging to your computer system because it has the ability to completely conceal itself. A virus can spread itself in many ways. It can spread when you use an infected disk to copy or use a file, or if you download an infected program onto your computer, or if you run certain programs, which can compromise on your computer’s security, making it susceptible to hackers who can spread viruses into your system. Research indicates that the most common source of a virus spreading itself is an email attachment, accounting for as many as 86% of the cases. One such virus that created a huge havoc was the Sobig Virus. The Sobig virus clogged up inboxes of millions of users and flooded the email servers and networks with the volume of email traffic produced by it. The businesses suffered huge downtime due to extremely slow network access. Some of the email systems had to be shut down temporarily to control the havoc created by the virus. The estimated economic damage worldwide caused by the Sobig virus was approximately $ 15 billion. Therefore, you should never open an email attachment that appears suspicious or comes from a completely unknown source. In addition, you should always use anti-virus software from a reputed company. There are times when people create effective backups through disks or other backup media but this media itself gets infected due to the computer virus. This can occur when your computer acquires a boot sector virus. Therefore, you can end up losing your data as well as your backups. To protect your data from such kind of a scenario, a business can opt for remote backups. Remote online backups allow automatic data backups in a methodical manner. This can help you retrieve your files when a malicious virus corrupts your files. Let us analyse what steps you can take once a virus has corrupted your valuable data.

Steps to Recover Data Corrupted by a Virus

Good anti-virus software will most probably be able to provide an option to disinfect the infected data and delete worms and Trojans.
You may need a special utility at times when the data gets corrupted by a virus. Download these special utilities from your anti-virus software vendor’s site to recover your data.
If some virus cannot be removed from infected objects, you may have to remove the file by deleting it to ensure that it does not spread to other files.





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