Basic Computer Viruses

Types of Viruses

• Boot Sector Virus
• Infects the boot or MBR of diskettes and hard drives through the sharing of infected disks and pirated software applications
• Once your hard drive is infected all diskettes that you use in your computer will be infected
• Program Virus
• Becomes active when the program file (usually with extensions .BIN, .COM, .EXE, .OVL, .DRV) carrying the virus is opened
• It then makes copies of itself and will infect other programs on the computer
• Multipartite Virus
• Hybrid of a Boot Sector and Program viruses
• It infects program files and when the infected program is active it will affect the boot record