Computer Viruses

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of time it takes to reverse the damage.

Trivial damage happens when all you have to do is get rid of the virus. There
may be some audio or visual effect; often there is no effect at all.

Minor damage occurs when you have to replace some or all of your executable
files from clean backups, or by re-installing. Remember to run FindVirus again
afterwards.

Moderate damage is done when a virus trashes the hard disk, scrambles the FAT,
or low-level formats the drive. This is recoverable from your last backup. If
you take backups every day you lose, on average, half a day's work.

Major damage is done by a virus that gradually corrupts data files, so that you
are unaware of what is happening. When you discover the problem, these corrupted
files are also backed up, and you might have to restore a very old backup to get
valid data.

Severe damage is done by a virus that gradually corrupts data files, but you
cannot see the corruption (there is no simple way of knowing whether the data ...

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of
the virus have no sequence of bytes in common. This makes it more difficult for
scanners to detect them.

Many scanners use the "Fuzzy Logic" technique and a "Generic Decryption Engine"
to detect these viruses.

The Partition and Partition Viruses

The partition sector is the first sector on a hard disk. It contains information
about the disk such as the number of sectors in each partition, where the DOS
partition starts, plus a small program. The partition sector is also called the
"Master Boot Record" (MBR).

When a PC starts up, it reads the partition sector and executes the code it
finds there. Viruses that use the partition sector modify this code.

Since the partition ...

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