Have you ever opened an email attachment from someone you don't recognise or downloaded a program from a source you don't know? If you have, the chances are that your computer could be infected by a virus.
But this is not the only way your computer can catch an infection!
Search engines on the web are a good
starting point for finding information about
computer viruses. Some good ones are:
www.bbc.co.uk
www.google.com
Please note that the BBC is not responsible
for the content of other websites. |
What is a virus? A virus is a small piece of software, maliciously created, which embeds itself into a program. Each time the program runs the virus will be activated and, depending on how it was made, will infect other files, programs and could, in a worst case scenario, cause your computer to crash completely. It is called a virus because like the human variety the infection can be spread to other computers and it will try to infect as many files as possible.  | Not all viruses will cause your computer to crash - some are just irritating.
Others can corrupt data, like changing numbers on a spreadsheet. |
Go to the next screen to have a look at different types of infections. | 
