A computer virus is a type of malware (harmful software), which exhibits a behavior analogous to a biological virus in relation to the stages of its life and whose intention is to cause some kind of damage to the affected system. Your goal can be diverse, ranging from stealing personal data to destroying documents and files.Before the name “virus”, studies dating from the late 1940s, written by John von Neumann, addressed the theory of self-reproducing automata. These studies showed that computer programs could be developed to spread to other machines, damaging them.Computer viruses have even been used by the intelligence services and security forces of several countries, and possibly every state has an arsenal of cyber weapons that includes viruses of various types. They can reach a computer system masquerading as harmless programs, hidden in areas of disks not visible or manipulable to users with little technical knowledge, or spread through computer networks. From here, it is necessary to mention one of the main qualities inherent to viruses: the capacity for self-replication, which is what makes them biological viruses and, therefore, gives meaning to their name. They also have an "incubation" period before the release of their viral load, that is, they carry out the malicious actions for which they were programmed. If it is not detected, it tries to carry out the actions that have been assigned. To combat the threat, its equivalent are not vaccines, as we would logically think, but so-called antivirus. <br />Until the early 1990s, this type of program was known as a self-replicating system. It was in 1980, when the German researcher Jürgen Kraus wrote a thesis comparing the potential behavior of certain computer programs with that of biological viruses. The first virus considered to be such was the Elk Cloner for the Apple II, programmed in 1982 by Rich Skrenta. All that virus was capable of doing was replicating with precision. <br /><br /><br />