Virus Tip : Home

Welcome to Virus Tip, here you can get advice about various viruses that exist at the moment. We have a resource centre which we are looking to expand in the near future.

What is a virus?

A virus is a self-replicating program with has intent of doing some kind of damage to your system. In most cases you will be completely unaware of their presence. Most viruses these days do not cause immediate damage to your machine where they could remove important data.

In fact many are written by script-kiddies and since the original email virus, first detected on 26th March 1999 - The Melissa virus - most are just variations of this concept. The Melissa virus caused havoc because it could automatically send itself to up to 50 people to the infected users email address book.

As it turns out most viruses since Melissa are essentially using a similar technique - getting a curious person to open a malicious email attachment to spread itself. The more recent MyDoom in 2004 works on this concept to and uses slightly more advanced techniques also including trying to spread itself using popular file-sharing application as well as through email.

How do I remove viruses?

There are many anti-virus software packages out there. The most common being Norton Antivirus and McAfee. There are however some free antivirus programs which do a good job in removing common viruses. These are;

Avast - Offers a free home edition for personal use.
Grisoft AVG - Personal version is free to use