Today's computer viruses have become sophisticated. Some viruses don't require any action on your side in order to take full control over your computer. You don't need to click, accept, or approve anything. You'll not even be aware of anything strange until it is too late. But when that dormant virus that installed itself on your PC activates – that's when it’s too late.

The next few steps are both interesting and scary:

1. A very dangerous piece of code resides in your hard disk, but is still dormant – it doesn't run and doesn't cause any damage – yet...
2. Then, another harmless-looking site or e-mail triggers the dormant code. Again, your anti-virus software doesn't really notice, because the piece of code is already on your computer. The AV software would usually just scan code that is downloaded and executed from the Internet. It usually trusts code that's already on your computer. If you have a firewall installed i won't do you any good against this attack. The application that triggers the virus is legitimate and has full rights to access the Internet.
3. Last but not least, the virus has to be executed on your computer. This last step requires assistance from a giant – Microsoft. Writing a web browser is a complicated task. It involves work from thousands of programmers. Such a complicated task is never flawless, and some bugs remain here and there. Computer hackers recognize these bugs and use them to make Microsoft's Internet Explorer do things it wasn't intended to do. Specifically, these bugs allow hackers to wake up (or trigger) dormant virus code on your computer.
4. And then your new visitor – the virus - can do whatever it feels like doing. Having administrative privileges, the new owner of your computer can have a look at your files, send them, change them, and often the most popular of all – simply erase them.

What Should I Do?
There are a few things that you can do to protect yourself from computer viruses. The key to protecting your computer is in understanding that no solution is perfect and that you should always trust your common sense before anything else.

Here are some things that you can do:

• Get anti-virus software, keep it updated, and use it frequently.


• Visit only known sites and don't follow random links.
• Open e-mails from trusted sources only.
• Delete the contents of your Temporary Internet Files folder and Recycly Bin frequently – these are great places for viruses to hide their private data.
• Keep up-to-date on modern virus techniques. You can read non-technical descriptions at plenty of sites, such as McAfee.