Phases of a Computer Virus

Different Phases Of a Virus

During it lifetime, a virus goes through four phases:

1) Dormant Phase

Here, the virus remains idle and gets activated based on a certain action or event(for example, a user pressing a key or on a certain date and time etc)

2)Propagation Phase

The virus starts propagating, that is multiplying itself. A piece of code copies itself and each copy starts copying more copies of self, thus propagating.

3)Triggering Phase

A Dormant virus moves into this phase when it gets activated, that is, the event it was waiting for gets initialised.

4)Execution Phase

This is the actual work of the virus. It can be destructive(deleting files on disk) or harmless(popping messages on screen).