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Proposed definitions will be considered for inclusion in the Economictimes.com Definition: A computer virus is a malicious software program loaded onto a user’s computer without the user’s knowledge and performs malicious actions. Description: The term 'computer virus' was first formally defined by Fred Cohen in 1983. Computer viruses never occur naturally. They are always induced by people. Once created and released, however, their diffusion is not directly under human control. After entering a computer, a virus attaches itself to another program in such a way that execution of the host program triggers the action of the virus simultaneously. It can self-replicate, inserting itself onto other programs or files, infecting them in the process. Not all computer viruses are destructive though. However, most of them perform actions that are malicious in nature, such as destroying data. Some viruses wreak havoc as soon as their code is executed, while others lie dormant until a particular event (as programmed) gets initiated, that causes their code to run in the computer. Viruses spread when the software or documents they get attached to are transferred from one computer to another using a network, a disk, file sharing methods, or through infected e-mail attachments. Some viruses use different stealth strategies to avoid their detection from anti-virus software. For example, some can infect files without increasing their sizes, while others try to evade detection by killing the tasks associated with the antivirus software before they can be detected. Some old viruses make sure that the "last modified" date of a host file stays the same when they infect the file.
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What is a program that attaches itself to a computer or a file?A computer virus is malicious code that replicates by copying itself to another program, computer boot sector or document and changes how a computer works.
What attaches itself to an executable program?Almost all viruses are attached to an executable file, which means the virus may exist on your computer but it actually cannot infect your computer unless you run or open the malicious program.
Is a computer software program that can copy itself to attach itself to other applications or files and infect a computer?Definition(s): A computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. A virus might corrupt or delete data on a computer, use e-mail programs to spread itself to other computers, or even erase everything on a hard disk.
Which of the following type of virus attaches itself to executable files?A well-known boot sector virus is the Michelangelo virus. File infectors, as their name implies, "infect" files on a computer by attaching themselves to executable files. They do this by either appending their code to the file or overwriting portions of the file code.
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