To know how to prevent from computer viruses, first we need to know what exactly they are. Well, a computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and also infect other computers. It means that a true virus can "travel" from one computer to another one by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer. Also, these viruses spread through download on the internet. Besides, this kind of viruses is able to interfere with computers operations. A virus might corrupt or delete data on a computer, use an email program to spread itself to other computers, or even erase everything on the hard disk.

The first computing virus attacked an IBM compute. It was called "Creeper" and it was created in 1972. This program often sent messages to the screen saying "I'm a creeper...catch me if you can". To eliminate this problem, the first antivirus program was created. Its name was "Reaper". However, the term virus was adopted in 1984.

But in 2000 the most famous virus was created. Its name was the Love Bug virus and it infected computers by opening emails whose title said "I love you". This virus travelled very fast to Asia, Europe and America deleting important files on the hard disk of computers all over the world. His creator was a young guy from The Philippines and fortunately for him, he was not sent to prison.

 Chronology of computer viruses

1949: John von Newman held a lecture at the University of Illinois about Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata". This work was published later and in it von Newman argued that a computer program could be able to reproduce.

1972: Veith Risak published an article called "Self-reproducing automata with minimal information exchange" which described a fully functional virus written in assembler language, a computer program to translate between lower-level representations of computer programs.

 1980: Jürgen Kraus wrote a diplom where he stated that computing viruses could behave in the same way as biological viruses.

 How to prevent from computing viruses?

 The first thing to take into account is that you keep your computer safe with the latest updates and antivirus tools. With this simple action you can keep the viruses away from your files. However, this is not the only way to protect your computer. You also must be careful with the emails you open in your computer because they could be infected and you do not know. For example, sometimes I have received emails with interesting names. They have attractive names to make people open them and in that way infect the computers or steal important files. Another good way to prevent our computers from these "malwares" (mixture of malicious and software) is to avoid execute any program without having checking it carefully especially if we downloaded from a website. Lastly, the best way to avoid a virus is to be informed of the last threats of computing viruses.