There are a lot of different worms and viruses out there. You may think that the entire thing is beyond your control. However, it really is no more beyond your control than a biological virus. A biological virus, when it infects the host, becomes apparent by way of certain observable symptoms. You are not going to get a little notification on your screen saying “You are infected with the BLAH virus”. Instead, you will begin to notice things that are out of the ordinary.

Here are some typical signs that your computer may be infected with a computer virus:

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1. The PC has slowed down noticeably and programs take longer to load.
2. The time-stamp on files may change. When a virus attaches itself to one of your files, it has to modify that file and this will result in the time-stamp (the date last modified) of the file being updated. If you notice a file that has been updated when it shouldn’t have, this may be a sign.
3. Increased level of disk access. The hard drive may get very busy or may be accessed when you are not doing anything. The floppy diskette drive (if you have one) may be accessed without explanation. With the hard drive, it is easy to confuse this activity with normal operating system maintenance activity.
4. Increased use of disk space without explanation – caused by the virus spreading in your files and attaching itself.
5. Errors about attempts to write to write-protected files or folders.
6. Strange characters appearing in file or folder names.
7. Strange messages appear on screen or in your documents.
8. Strange graphical displays on screen, such as falling letters or some other attention-getting display.
9. Overall instability, random crashes.
10. Documents overwritten with garbled text.

It is also worth noting that it is possible that your computer has trojans or other viruses laying dormant on the machine without your knowledge. For example, most people will routinely get viruses emailed to them. This is not really a matter of concern because, in most cases, you have to actually open the attachment to begin infection. Besides, your virus scanner should detect these. Via one method or another, it is not uncommon for a computer to have various malware installed and not know about it. You will not notice any symptoms simply because the computer is not officially infected until the malware is actually executed.

Microsoft Windows is the most common attack point for virus writers. According to statistics, there are over 140,000 known viruses for Windows, around 4,000 for MS-DOS, and only 30 for Linux and 1 for Mac OS X. So, if you are running a computer powered by Microsoft Windows, this is certainly a problem you need to concern yourself with.

This is not to say that Linux and OS X users are immune. As noted earlier, many virus writers have a particular bone to pick with Microsoft. Perhaps they are jealous over the company’s success and just want to poke holes in their software. Whatever the motive, the popularity of Windows also makes it an ideal target. The user population of OS X and Linux is nowhere near as large as that of Windows, making it not as attractive as a target.

If a virus writer is trying to create an effect, they will go where the people are. If more end users migrate to OS X or Linux, those operating systems will begin to find themselves the target for these same kinds of security breaches. Users of Linux and OS X like to brag that those operating systems are immune from computer viruses. This is almost definitely not the case. The truth is only that those systems are not as attractive of a target because not as many people use them.

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