No. Opening a single secure protocol to direct access is usually more secure than allowing

Overview Computer viruses are self-replicating malicious programs that attach themselves to normal programs without the users awareness or consent. They are one of the most feared causes of data loss-but, as it turns out, they have more of a reputation than they deserve. More than 90 of viruses are completely harmless aside from the computing resources that they waste by propagating. You are much more likely to lose data due to a hardware failure or by human error than due to a virus infection. self-replicating Having the ability to create copies of itself. Despite the fact that most viruses are harmless, some viruses cause all sorts of unexpected behavior like system crashes, strange pop-up messages, and the deletion of important files. Some extremely clever worms copy themselves using the Internet and can absorb so much bandwidth that they interfere with the proper operation of your Internet connections. Even completely benign viruses that have no apparent ill affects expand the size of executable files and macro-enabled documents like barnacles encrusting a ships hull. Understanding Viruses To combat viruses effectively, you need to understand how they propagate and what defenses are available. Computers store two entirely different types of information: executable code and data. Code specifies how the computer should operate, while data provides the information on which the operation is performed. For example, in the equation 1+1=2, the 1, 1, and 2 are the data and the + and = are code. The difference between code and data is crucial to virus defense because only code is susceptible to virus infection. Viruses can corrupt data but cannot propagate using pure data, because data does not provide an execution environment for viruses to run in. executable code Information that represents computer instructions. Lists of code called programs are executed by a microprocessor in order to perform a function. data Information that represents some real world information, like a novel, a picture, a sound, or a bank account. Data is processed by code to create answers that are themselves represented by data and can be further processed. But its not always clear what is data and what is code. Is a Word document code or data? Its mostly data, but because Word documents can contains macros that Word interprets in order to perform complex operations, it can also contain code. The same goes for any macro- enabled application that stores a mixture of code and data in a single document. Applications that look at data and then perform wide-ranging operations based on that data are called execution environments, interpreters, or scripting hosts.