You do not just need English to work with computers, you also need to learn the special English ('jargon') which computers have made necessary! If you want to know about viruses, here is some essential vocabulary.
VXer: a criminal who writes viruses - sometimes for fun, sometimes for profit.
Malware: Any program which is designed to harm your computer or its security.
Adware: A program that shows you advertisements (sometimes lots and lots of advertisements) while you are using the net. Many people think a website is showing all the advertisements, when it is the adware infecting their computer.
Trojan: A program which gets into your computer by hiding itself in another, innocent piece of software.
Worm: Malware which spreads from computer to computer in a network, often without the user doing anything, or even being logged in.
Owned: When a black hat's program is able to give him total control of someone else's machine.
Phoning home: When a virus or spyware had successfully entered a computer, it can signal the VXer that he can start his egg-drop.
Egg-drop: When a trojan has allowed a VXer into a computer, he must then download ('do an egg-drop') onto that computer all the files he needs to use to own it.
Signature: A piece of code that an anti-virus program can use to identify a virus.
Exploit: The method that a particular virus uses to infect a computer.
Payload: A virus has three parts - the part that gets it into a computer's operating system, a part that it uses to spread further, and the payload - what it actually does to the computer it has infected.
Spoofing: Email viruses do not want to be traced back to the machine that they came from, so they pretend to be sent from another computer.
Social engineering: Persuading a user to run an infected file. This is sometimes done by emails which pretend to be jokes, pornography or 'important notices'.
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