A virus is that nasty little organism that can give you the cold or the flu, or any number of other diseases. It’s a horrdendous little critter that makes you feel awful. Good thing that there are vaccines for many of these viruses, right? I don’t want to get the flu every winter.

Viruses are not fun

Computer viruses are similar. They’re nasty little programs that can make your computer do things you don’t want it to do. They can search for information on your computer, make your computer send spam, make your computer be part of a DDOS, all sorts of things you don’t want your computer to do. In other words, viruses are bad.

Computer viruses

Which is true for both people and computers, they’re just different things. You can’t get a cold and give it to your computer and if your computer gets a virus, it won’t give it to you, I promise.

On the other hand, your computer can have a virus and you’ll never know. It’d be doing things you don’t want it to and without a monitoring program, your computer will be happily being bad. That’s why antiviruses are good for your computer.

A vaccine will stop one virus (and maybe some mutations of it). Antivirus programs try to stop all kinds of bad software, not just one kind. Without antivirus software, your computer could get that virus and did I mention how you might never know? Some computer viruses are really bad and try to make your computers useless, but most just try to make your computer do things that it wants you to do.

Computer viruses are also known as malware, which is short for malicious software. In fact, that’s the most common name for computer viruses. They’re used by bad guys to make money and we’ll talk more about the different ways they do that.