Nobody likes viruses, whether they’re biological or computer ones. They’re both irritating, persistent, and we need a forceful approach to get rid of them. Take a look below for 30 scary and bizarre facts about computer viruses.

1. You can never be too careful when it comes to computer viruses. You can even pick them up through music, files, or photo sharing, by visiting an infected website, opening spam email or an email attachment, downloading free games, toolbars, and installing software applications without carefully reading license agreements.

2. Specific computer viruses are destroying programs, deleting files, or reformatting the hard drive.

3. Other viruses replicate themselves or overflow the network with traffic, making it impossible to perform any internet activity.

4. Even the less destructive computer viruses can radically disrupt your system’s performance, reducing computer memory and causing frequent computer crashes.

5. Your computer is infected if you notice malware symptoms like slow computer performance, unpredictable computer behaviour, unexplained data loss, and frequent computer crashes.

6. To protect your PC with the best computer virus protection use antivirus protection and a firewall, get antispyware software and keep it up-to-date, regularly update your operating system, increase your browser security, avoid dubious Web sites, only download software from trusted sites, carefully evaluate free software and file-sharing applications before downloading them, don’t open messages from unknown senders and immediately delete messages you suspect to be spam.

7. An unprotected computer is like an open door for computer viruses.

8. Firewalls monitor Internet traffic in and out of your computer and hide your PC from online scammers looking for easy targets.

9. While free antivirus downloads are available, they just can’t offer the computer virus help you need to keep up with the continuous viruses’ attacks, so it’s critical you have up-to-the-minute, guaranteed antivirus protection.

10. In March 2005, the first smartphone virus named “Commwarrior-A” came into existence.

11. Viruses can be written in many programming languages.

12. Symantec launched its first Norton Antivirus in 1990.

13. Tequuila 1991 was the first polymorphic computer virus.

14. Many viruses were transferred using floppy disks before the development of computer networks.

15. A dangerous computer virus called Elk Cloner was displaying a poem after 51 triggers. Created as a joke it was inserted in a floppy with a game.

16. The first Windows virus was WinVer 1.4.

17. Researches show that the authors of malicious software are typically males, between 14 and 25 years old.

18. Starting in January a worm named “Storm” corrupted around 50 million computers by October 2007.

19. Every month more than 6000 new computer viruses are generated and released.

20. Facebook pays 500$ to the person, who finds a weakness in its system.

21. MyDoom, the most expensive computer virus of all time caused damage worth $38.5 billion!

22. The same virus infected almost a quarter-million computers in a day.

23. In 1990, there were only fifty identified computer viruses but now there are more than 48,000.

24. It is detected that virus writers start writing codes as children to test their programming skills. The problem occurs when they reach a dangerous level.

25. “I love” was the most viral computer virus ever.

26. It is illegal to write a computer virus program in many countries like Germany and Finland.

27. Germany constrains mass exchange of computer viruses and Finland has proclaimed that writing a computer virus program is an illegal act.

28. Cyber terrorism, cyber extortion, and cyber warfare are new types of computer crimes that have emerged as a result of the consistently growing number of hackers and computer viruses.

29. According to records, the U.S is at the highest risk of being attacked by computer viruses followed by Russia.

30. The worst MS-DOS virus was known as Michelangelo.