Computer viruses are becoming more and more prevalent as hackers, terrorists, and yes, even bored, but computer-savvy teenagers, continue to "improve" upon the nasty bugs they send across the Internet to unsuspecting (and often VERY suspecting, but under-protected) computer users.

Viruses fall into a number of categories and subcategories... "species," "strains," and "mutations" might be a better term.  Like physical viruses, they often change form and attack in many different ways, sometimes benignly and sometimes with devastating... and fatal... effects.

The latter point was, until September 11th, a euphemism for the death of your computer... Today, however, we know that viruses can be used to infect just about any computerized gadget, even cell phones and pagers, and some have even said it would be possible to infect car computers and airplanes.  Having your car's brake system suddenly stop working at 70 mph or an airplane's oxygen system shut off at 35,000 feet is a sobering thought... and though we should not stop living life exactly the way we always have, and more, we should be aware of the seriousness of the problem.

As far as your personal, home computer, the effects might not be physically damaging to you, but they can range anywhere from annoying to completely financially, even legally, destructive to you.

Of the many types of viruses, the most prevalent are the Trojan (also Trojan/Worm), the email viruses, and the "scanner" viruses found on many websites.  Their delivery methods also range from the simple (you opened an attachment to an email which was a virus) to the Mission Impossible stuff (a hacker stealthily locates and enters your computer using sophisticated tools and places a "payload" on your system, arms and triggers it, and steps back out before they're detected).

Some viruses are relatively harmless, simply copying themselves to emails and sending themselves to everyone in your computer's address book.  Those are annoying and can be troublesome if you have a large address book by tying up Internet servers and bandwidth, but other than that they may do no real harm.  Some variations on these same viruses, do worse... they attach to their emails random DOCUMENTS and files found on your hard drives, possibly even containing credit, financial, personal, or business information... and then broadcast this sensitive information to your address book, or even the virus creators themselves.  Often, these viruses use "spoof" FROM addresses, so they may appear to be from one person when in fact they originated from someone else on that person's address book.  Of interesting note is the email received from a friend's email address... yet you know they're in the middle of moving cross-country and their computer has been shut down for a week...!

Other viruses, the more malicious kind, not only drop their virus payload into your emails, but finish the job by deleting or destroying your computer's files.  In yet another case, the Trojans, a virus sits quietly on your hard drive, and every time you open up an Internet connection it signals "home base," the virus creator's secret hideout, and establish a two-way connection to allow this hacker to gain access to virtually anything on your hard drive... from sensitive information to wiping everything off the hard drive to connecting to other networked computers and infecting them.

Most viruses can be caught, destroyed, and cleaned out of your computer before they do any harm, PROVIDING you not only have an active virus scanning software application installed (such as McAfee VirusScan or Norton AntiVirus) but keep it updated with the latest anti-virus DAT files (available for download from their websites, usually by subscription).  These not only protect you against email viruses and bugs infecting files you wish to download, but also can be set to continually scan your hard drives for "hidden" viruses that are just waiting to be activated.

For protection against hackers, further steps must be taken, and that primarily includes "Firewalls."  Many are available, such as McAfee Personal Firewall, ZoneAlarm, BlackIce, and others.  These software firewalls protect your personal computer very well, but suffer from the same limitation the rest of your computer does, which is they can ALSO be infected if not properly protected.  Hardware firewalls, such as Preferred Internet Technology's netMIND (with virusBLOCK), are the safest and most effective protection and depending on the level of security you want, can be well worth the money.

As pertains to IBI Global members, one of the means of networking with our thousands of professionals and mentors and fellow students is the ability to maintain contact instantly through email and instant messaging.  Although this is a huge advantage, without proper virus protection many of our members contract a virus and then unintentionally "blast" many other members with viruses.  It's especially critical to be careful of unusual, unexpected emails and attachments from IBI Global members because each of us TRUSTS the others, and these viruses often come from people you know.  Of recent note are the Klez virus and the SirCam virus, though others crop up from time to time and virus creators are always coming up with new variations.  The only way to make sure YOU don't catch one of these bugs is to protect your computer immediately.  And remember... when in doubt, DELETE.