• Question: What makes up a computer virus?

    Asked by to Ian on 17 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ian Stephenson

      Ian Stephenson answered on 17 Jun 2014:

      A computer virus is just a regular program. However it’s main task is to make copies of itself. The simplest virus might be a program that runs on your PC, that waits until you plug in a USB stick. When it sees a stick, it makes a copy of itself onto the stick, and sets it to auto run when that stick is put in to another PC.

      When the stick is put into another PC, the program gets run automatically (which is a major security issue – you should probably never let programs auto run unless you’re 100% certain they’re safe). It then copies itself from the stick onto the hard disk, and sets itself up to run whenever the PC is turned on. From there it will infect more memory sticks…

      Real computer viruses also have a “payload” – where it actually does bad stuff like steal passwords, and code to hide what its doing.

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