Virus ABCs

A computer virus is a software progam that was first written Rich Skrenta in 1982 who was a 15-year old high school student. Known as The Elk Cloner this virus spread to other computers by monitoring the floppy drive and copying itself to any floppy diskette that was inserted into the computer. Once a floppy diskette became infected it would infect all other computers that disk was inserted into, each computer that was infected would then infect every floppy diskettes inserted into it. A computer that was infected would also display a short poem on every 50th boot.

Computer users can help protect themselves against computer viruses, malware, and other computer security threats by installing an antivirus protection program.