Types of Viruses and their impacts

A computer virus is in fact a computer program which is very identical to your other application programs but smaller in size and mainly developed by a computer programmer to damage your computer and its data in anyway. The biggest feature or characteristic of a computer virus is-it can replicate the similar programs once it gets into your system. Apart from data loss and other damages a virus is capable to produce many ill effects in your computer such as slow computer, computer freezing unexpected shutdown, blue screen of death, automatic restart and many more.

Types of Viruses

1. Boot sector virus- As the name indicates it affects master boot record,” and which is the first sector on a partitioned storage device. The virus was very popular in floppy days.
2. 
   
3. Direct Action virus- This type of virus, unlike most, only comes into action when the file containing the virus is executed.
4. Most viruses do not use the direct action method of reproduction simply because it is not prolific. The most popular example in the past of this virus was Vienna virus, which briefly threatened computers in 1988.
5. Browser hijacker- This kind of virus attacks your browsers most often. It can cause many abnormal behavior of your browser such as it redirects you to some other web pages, the browser becomes very slow, you may also experience a slow computer issue sometime. CoolWebSearch may be the most well known example, but others are nearly as common.
6. Macro virus- Macro viruses are the viruses that use other application's macro programming language to reproduce themselves. They infect documents such as MS Word and MS Excel and are typically spread to other similar documents.
7. File Infector Virus- File infector viruses are programmed in a way so that they will attach themselves to exe files, compressed files such as zip files and driver files. They start executing when the files where they are hidden. Then after the virus is set into motion it will attach itself to other programs and system files and start along its intended path for which it was written.
8. Multipartite Virus- These viruses enter the computer through various types of media and then push in themselves in the system memory. They then go into the hard disk drive and infect the all the boot sectors. When they reach into the boot sectors these viruses infect executable files and spread themselves in the entire system.
9. Polymorphic virus- The biggest feature of polymorphic virus is that it changes it's digital signature every time it replicates. This is the reason most of the security programs such as antivirus cannot detect and remove it from your computer. This may also infect the windows registry and you may need a registry repair to remove it.
10. Resident Virus- A resident virus is the program which resides inside the computer’s memory and from where it reproduces itself towards all other area of the machine.
11. All the above mentioned viruses can cause many issues in your computer including slow computer, computer freezing, unexpected shutdown and many more. The official solution for removing all types of viruses is to run an updated antivirus and antispyware programs.