Scary facts about virusesSafeBytes Software

The concept of a computer virus (something that can infect and take over your computer) is scary enough without these amazing facts. The first notable feature is how widespread viruses are and how many are being created on a monthly basis.

There has been years, where close to 50,000 viruses were created on average per day. By 2011 we had no fewer than 18 million known viruses with many of them still hidden in the darkest reaches of their shadowy production process.

There was one day, when a shocking 165,000 different computer viruses were released in a single day. Every twitter user receives an average of 17 different malware programs on a daily basis. This is no longer a personal project of some naughty teenagers, but an industry that is bringing in billions of dollars for those who control it.

Meanwhile, the poor PC user has to face the music. The level of sophistication is increasing to the extent that computer viruses are now able to touch mobile and Mac devices, which were once thought to be impenetrable.

More and more disturbing information is coming out

Even those users that have some antivirus software are not knowledgeable enough to change the minimum security default settings to their highest possible categories. That means, that you are probably vulnerable regardless of the antivirus program that you have been using for your computer.

Worst still, some viruses are designed to appear to be helpful in fighting infection, so that you could actually be shopping for danger the moment that you seek an antivirus package.

That is not to say, that you should immediately put your antivirus settings to the highest possible categories. This will inevitably slow down your computer processes and you may end up wishing that you had never installed the software in the first place.

For those who are running an office or any other large scale organization, the rapid replication of computer viruses presents particular challenges which can destroy a number of computers within a very small time frame.

The difficulty of recovery

Once your computer is infected with a virus, it will never really be the same. First of all, there are always remnants of problems that arise from the way in which it has messed up the operating system. Secondly, you are constantly looking over your shoulder, figuratively just in case you have acquired another virus.

The very worst of the worst is the BIOS chip which was capable of freezing computers within a matter of seconds.

If that were to happen, you would need a really good reprogramming chip to have any hope of ever recovering any type of functionality. Others just delete your partition table and mess up files that you have kept for years.

Now we hear that there are viruses that could potentially be transmitted using airwaves. That means that a nearby microphone could potentially cause problems for your computer. The fact that there are almost daily upgrades of viruses to make them worse, does not bode well for any computer user or owner.