Shoutbox

quote:

---

Originally posted by CookieRevised
eg: all of a sudden your HDD starts to do a masive amount of stuff = this can indicate virus activity (eg: HDD is being formatted or erased!)... Or every second your hard disk light lights up, this can also indicate malicous activity which you would otherwise not notice... Etc.

---

Quite correct, it can be a good indicator of strange activity.

However, I would not recommend less experienced computer users panic every time the LED indicates a lot of hard drive activity, nowadays there are numerous household programs (eg. Windows Automatic Updater, Antivirus programs like AVG, Many IM clients, Steam) that automatically update themselves, by default, and this will cause a sudden surge in unexpected hard disk activity.

quote:

---

Originally posted by ShawnZ
its VERY unlikely that a virus would ever bother to erase things on your hard drive

---

There are many malicious programmes, such as worms, that are designed to get in and erase data on computers. Many writers of malicious software are targeting businesses, and erasing data is a good way to do this.