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Bernice asked: “If my computer has a virus, have I been invaded by someone?”
Bernice, you haven’t necessarily been “invaded” exactly, different malware has different goals, but you definitely want to get rid of the virus.
Some modern malware actually encrypts your data, locks you out, and sells you the key so you can have access again. That’s what we call ransomware, that sounds pretty invasive to us.
There’s also malware that tries to find and steal your financial or personal data, again, that sure sounds like an invasion to us.
Some malware isn’t like that at all, you may remember Distributed Denial of Service attacks a couple of years ago that turned devices into weapons against specific services.
If you were infected by those, odds are you didn’t even notice, but it would’ve put your devices in the service of bad actors. That’s less of an invasion against your person, and there wouldn’t have been a person actively accessing your device in particular, but there would’ve been a person ordering a network that included your devices to do something. In that case you wouldn’t be the target of the attack but a tool, but it’s still malware, and it’s still an abuse of your devices.
Sometimes malware infections give a person access to invade your files, sometimes it’s more of an automated thing, but it always seems to us to be some kind of invasion that you don’t want, so keep your antivirus and operating system updated, and run your antivirus often.