COMPUTER VIRUSES, 14TH OCT 2019
Computer Viruses
Zainab Yasar, Student, SEECS, NUST
I. ABSTRACT
When you have all your information in your
personal diary such as your bank statements, your
passwords, your profits and losses etc, you always
keep it safe and try to keep it out of other’s reach
but now diaries have been replaced by computers.
So, obviously it becomes vital to protect them from
intrusion. One of the common ways to mess up your
computer is to put a virus into it. This document will
notify us some interesting facts about viruses.
Index Terms—Computer viruses, bugs, worms, trojan
horse.
II. I NTRODUCTION
T The Computer virus is a vindictive program
that self-duplicates by replicating itself to an-
other program. As it were, computer virus spreads
without anyone else’s input into other executable
code or archives. The reason for making computer
virus is to damage defenseless frameworks, gain
administrator control and exploit client delicate
information. Programmers plan computer viruses
with malicious intent and go after online clients by
deceiving them.
A. Types of viruses
There are innumerable types of computer viruses.
The ones which have caused the most damages are
Code Red, Zeus, ILOVEYOU, Mydoom, Nimda etc.
I will discuss some of them. ”NIMDA” which was
launched on Semptember 2001 i.e. a week after
9/11, was the fastest spreading malware. it damaged
more than 2 million computers in less than 24
hours. the main target of this virus were the web
computers. Computerworld Magazine reported that
this virus topped their list of viruses in 22 minutes.
The second one is ”ILOVEYOU” virus. it was
launched from Philippines. the mode of it’s attack
was an attachment by the name “LOVE-LETTER-
FOR-YOU.txt.vbs”. due to vbs, people mistook it cause of a lot of loss. we can avoid such hazards
Zainab Yasar is a student at SEECS, NUST
1
for a normal text file. It corrupted more than 500,000
computer systems and caused a loss of 5.5 billion
dollars. The worst of all the viruses was ”Zeus”.
It was designed to invade in the computer sytem
to perform criminal taks.it was first identified in
2009 when it compromised many FTP accounts and
computer systens of multinational companies and
banks. Some of them were Amazon, Oracle, Bank of
America, Cisco, etc. Zeus controllers used it to get
hold of log in credentials of social network, email
and banking accounts. About a million computers
were infected only in USA by it and 70 million
dollars were stolen. Later 100 people were arrested
for being involved in this robbery
1) How do viruses operate?: There are some
viruses that attack on computer’s boot sector which
is the area in the hard drive that hosts the code for
start up procedure. A root code code such as this
activates itself whenever the computer is switched
on. some of the viruses are hidden games and in
attached documents in emails. Computer worms
spread without the users interaction. All that is
required for the worm to activate is to become
active on an infected folder. They usually damage
the pc by consuming bandwidth and overloading
web servers, some of them infect the computer by
payloads. Payloads is a code written to steal and
delete data. It can even create a backdoor in host
computer for it to be controlled by others. Botnets
are also a common way to corrupt computers. it is
in fact, a code that spreads through attachments and
corrupt computers. The corrupted computers then,
become part of their web and they gain full control
of your computer which they then use to carry out
illegal tasks.
III. C ONCLUSION
it is quite explicit from the above discussion that
viruses are quite threatening and can become the
by keeping our computers up to date. Moreover, we
should install some quality antivirus and also keep it
COMPUTER VIRUSES, 14TH OCT 2019 2

updated. Avoiding any suspicious website or email

also reduces chances of virus attack. In addition to
that, always keep a back up of your data so that
the virus does not cause too much damage. It is
truly said that ”Everything bad has some good in
it”. viruses, though they are used with malicious
intentions but if they are used properly, they can be
quite beneficial.

R EFERENCES
[1] Good Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea, Vesselin Bontchev

Zainab Yasar
BSCS NUST School of Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science.
CMS ID: 292729
Class: 9 C