Computer viruses, and other threats

 

One of the best ways to defend your computer from threats is know how they behave. By knowing how different kinds of threats work, what parts of the computer they affect and how they behave, you will be better prepared to protect yourself against them.

 

Basically there are three types of viruses:

 

Boot viruses

File viruses

Macro viruses

 

There are also other threatening ‘species’. Among them, the following can be highlighted:

 

Worms

Trojans or Trojan horses

Spyware

Spam

Jokes

Dialers

Hacking tools

 

These can all use different techniques to carry out their infection, propagate and carry out certain actions in infected computers. Depending on the techniques that they use, some viruses can be included in specific categories: resident, overwrite, encrypted, multipartite, polymorphic, stealth, tunneling, etc. For more information about different types of threats and the techniques they use, consult the Techniques used by viruses section in this Help file. You can also find information on viruses in the Virus Encyclopedia, on the Panda Software website www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encyclopedia.