A virus is a piece of code, or whole program, that is designed to be loaded onto a computer without the user's knowledge for malicious intent. Virii have many forms, and can do many things, such as just type a single letter no matter which key is pressed on the keyboard, to wiping out hard drives completely and making the whole computer lock up and not be able to be accessed. Some of the worst viruses actually attach themselves automatically to email lists and auto-send themselves so that they can infect as many people as possible. The Trojan virus is one such example of these malicious programs. Many times people download virii unbeknownst to them just by opening the infected email. This starts the cycle and then their computer is infected, and it is sent to everyone else on their contact list.

A worm is a self-contained computer program that is able to spread functional copies of itself to other computer systems (usually via network connections). Unlike viruses, worms do not need to attach themselves to a host program to do damage. It will scan the network for new victims and attack by itself.

A trojan is a virus that is delivered inside a program that the user install in the computer

At Dotcom we help to protect you from viruses by scanning all outgoing and incoming email. Our scanner is kept up to date so that we can detect the latest viruses.