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Any time you access the internet you may be susceptible to infection from viruses, trojan horses and worms. Sometimes these files can be harmless, however. Other times these can do major damage to your computer by deleting files, formatting drives, sending personal information to hackers throughout the world, etc.

Definitions:

Computer Virus:

In computer technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. Thus, a computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus. All computer viruses are manmade.

A computer program usually hidden in an existing program. Once the existing program is executed, the virus program is activated and can attach itself to other programs or files. Viruses can range from benign activities such as attaching a harmless message to performing malicious activities such as destroying all the data on a computer hard drive. Viruses are commonly distributed as e-mail attachments which activate when the attachment is opened. Virus protection software, updated regularly with the latest virus definitions, can help protect computers from viruses.

A computer program with an apparently or actually useful function that contains additional (hidden) functions that surreptitiously exploit the legitimate authorizations of the invoking process to the detriment of security. For example, making a "blind copy" of a sensitive file for the creator of the Trojan Horse.

Tojan Horse:

A Trojan horse is a program in which malicious or harmful code is contained inside apparently harmless programming or data in such a way that it can get control and do its chosen form of damage, such as ruining the file allocation table or hard disk. A Trojan horse may be widely redistributed as part of a computer virus.

A Trojan horse can also send private and personal information, Such as credit card details, internet service information, etc. back to the author of the Trojan horse. To be used in whatever manner they see fit. Which for obvious reasons is really really bad

Worms:

A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. A virus attaches itself to, and becomes part of, another executable program; however, a worm is self-contained and does not need to be part of another program to propagate itself. They are often designed to exploit the file transmission capabilities found on many computers.

Worm viruses can be a simple as just changing words and letters in your documents to changing the computers BIOS settings which can cause major problems. Such as your computer freezing, shutting down at random, slower running PCs, etc.

Adware:

Programs that, when installed on your computer, change settings, display advertising, and/or track Internet behavior and report information back to a central database. Spyware sometimes installed unintentionally by users along with other wanted software, and can be very hard to remove. Also known as Spyware or Malware