What’s the difference between viruses, spyware, and firewalls?
Viruses are little computer programs specifically written by hackers to either A) wreck your system, B) send out valuable data (such as your credit card numbers), or C) both. Like the human version, they are quite contagious and their goal is to replicate. They used to be commonly caught by floppy disks, but now it is usually via email and sometimes malicious websites. Other forms of viruses are called Trojans and Worms–while not technically “viruses” in the strict sense of the word, they might as well be: they’re all bad for your computer. Viruses, trojans and worms have gotten extremely sneaky in recent years. They may show up in an email that really looks like it’s from your friend (who didn’t send it, his or her infected computer did so automatically), or as a funny joke with the urging to open a file or click on something. Sometimes they come in hoax emails. It’s wise to be cautious, but in additon to that you ought to have a program like Norton Antivirus to catch things automatic
