Computer viruses are types of a computer program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other computer programs and inserting their own code. When this replication succeeds, the affected systems are then said to be infected with a computer virus.
Computer viruses currently cause billions of dollars’ worth of economic damage each year, due to causing system failure, wasting computer resources, corrupting data, increasing maintenance costs, stealing personal information and more.
Read the full article Computer virus on Wikipedia.
If you like to learn more about computer viruses, an authority on this field is Dr. Vesselin Vladimirov Bontchev, that works at the National Laboratory of Computer Virology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Here you can find a lot of scientific papers about computer viruses wrote by the Dr. Vesselin.
If you are using a macOS or a Windows system, you should learn more about computer viruses and how to protect your system from them. If you want to be safer, you should switch to Linux.
References:
- Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques – https://www.springer.com/journal/
- Journal in Computer Virology – https://dl.acm.org/journal/spjcv
- What Is a Computer Virus? – https://www.avg.com/en/signal/what-is-a-computer-virus