A Computer Virus can attack a PC in many number of ways; email attachments, clicking on links, pen drives, from network computers. Symptoms or identifying a virus infection will be based on many things and the main identifiers are listed below:
- The computer crashes, and then it restarts every few minutes in the middle of something.
- The computer restarts on its own.
- Applications on the computer do not work correctly.
- Disks or disk drives are inaccessible.
- You cannot print items correctly.
- You see distorted menus and dialog boxes.
- There is a double extension on an attachment that you recently opened, such as a .jpg, .vbs, .gif, or .exe. extension.
- An antivirus program is disabled for no reason and cannot be restarted.
- An antivirus program cannot be installed on the computer, or the antivirus program will not run.
- New icons appear on the desktop that you did not put there, or the icons are not associated with any recently installed programs.
- A program disappears from the computer even though you did not intentionally remove the program.
Symptoms of worms and trojan horse viruses in e-mail messages:
When a computer virus infects e-mail messages or infects other files on a computer, you may notice the following symptoms:- The infected file may make copies of itself. This behavior may use up all the free space on the hard disk.
- A copy of the infected file may be sent to all the addresses in an e-mail address list.
- The computer virus may reformat the hard disk which will delete all files and programs.
- The computer virus may install hidden programs, such as pirated software that will deactivate the original version and sells the same pirated version.
- The computer virus may reduce security. This could enable intruders to remotely access the computer or the network.
- You receive an e-mail message that has a strange attachment. When you open the attachment, dialog boxes appear, or a sudden degradation in system performance occurs.
- Someone tells you that they have recently received e-mail messages from you that contained attached files that you did not send. The files that are attached to the e-mail messages have extensions such as .exe, .bat, .scr, and .vbs extensions.
