A computer virus is a computer program that not only sounds unpleasant but is also dangerous to have on your computer system, no matter what type of virus it is, malware, adware, spyware, etc.

When a new computer virus invades the online computer world, there is less likelihood that anti-virus software is able to be effective enough to prevent the malware on the same day. However, British engineers have now discovered a solution to forthcoming virus and security issues.

Engineers Simon Wiseman and Richard Oak from defense technology company Qinetiq, Worcestershire, have uncovered tracking mechanism to avoid computer viruses. This would be done by intercepting every file that could most likely hide a virus and adding a string of computer code to it that would disable any virus from infecting the files.

Their new system is mainly concentrated on emailed attachments and adds the extra code to them as they run through a mail server. The main feature of the scheme, which they are patenting, is that any knowledge of the virus itself isn’t required. It was announced in the journal ‘New Scientist‘ that it is able to handle new, unknown ‘zero day’ viruses as well as older ones. A large number of mail servers already cut off attachments that will run as executable programs, such as PC files with an .exe suffix, if they are viruses.

You may ask how virus authors trick computer users? As an example, they are able to cover files as a harmless Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file to deceive unaware users to convert them to an ‘executable’ program file that will run on their computer. Qinetiq declares that users could get rid of the threat by inserting a new line of machine code, the raw code that microprocessor chips understand, into the header area of incoming files.