Virus Behavior

Viruses come in a great many different forms, but they all potentially have two phases to their execution, the infection phase and the attack phase:

Infection Phase

Virus writers have to balance how and when their viruses infect against the possibility of being detected. Therefore, the spread of an infection may not be immediate.

When the virus executes it has the potential to infect other programs. What's often not clearly understood is precisely when it will infect the other programs. Some viruses infect other programs each time they are executed; other viruses infect only upon a certain trigger. This trigger could be anything; a day or time, an external event on your PC, a counter within the virus, etc. Virus writers want their programs to spread as far as possible before anyone notices them.
It is a serious mistake to execute a program a few times - find nothing infected and presume there are no viruses in the program. You can never be sure the virus simply hasn't yet triggered its infection phase!
Many viruses go resident in the memory of your PC in the same or similar way as terminate and stay resident (TSR) programs. (For those not old enough to remember TSRs, they were programs that executed under DOS but stayed in memory instead of ending.) This means the virus can wait for some external event before it infects additional programs. The virus may silently lurk in memory waiting for you to access a diskette, copy a file, or execute a program, before it infects anything. This makes viruses more difficult to analyze since it's hard to guess what trigger condition they use for their infection.
On older systems, standard (640K) memory is not the only memory vulnerable to viruses. It is possible to construct a virus which will locate itself in upper memory (the space between 640K and 1M) or in the High Memory Area (the small space between 1024K and 1088K). And, under Windows, a virus can effectively reside in any part of memory.
Resident viruses frequently take over portions of the system software on the PC to hide their existence. This technique is called stealth. Polymorphic techniques also help viruses to infect yet avoid detection.
Note that worms often take the opposite approach and spread as fast as possible. While this makes their detection virtually certain, it also has the effect of bringing down networks and denying access; one of the goals of many worms.

 

Attack Phase

Viruses need time to infect. Not all viruses attack, but all use system resources and often have bugs.

Many viruses do unpleasant things such as deleting files or changing random data on your disk, simulating typos or merely slowing your PC down; some viruses do less harmful things such as playing music or creating messages or animation on your screen. Just as the infection phase can be triggered by some event, the attack phase also has its own trigger.
Does this mean a virus without an attack phase is benign? No. Most viruses have bugs in them and these bugs often cause unintended negative side effects. In addition, even if the virus is perfect, it still steals system resources. (Also, see the "good" virus discussion.)
Viruses often delay revealing their presence by launching their attack only after they have had ample opportunity to spread. This means the attack could be delayed for days, weeks, months, or even years after the initial infection.
The attack phase is optional, many viruses simply reproduce and have no trigger for an attack phase. Does this mean that these are "good" viruses? No! Anything that writes itself to your disk without your permission is stealing storage and CPU cycles. (Also see the "good" virus discussion.) This is made worse since viruses that "just infect," with no attack phase, often damage the programs or disks they infect. This is not an intentional act of the virus, but simply a result of the fact that many viruses contain extremely poor quality code.
An an example, one of the most common past viruses, Stoned, is not intentionally harmful. Unfortunately, the author did not anticipate the use of anything other than 360K floppy disks. The original virus tried to hide its own code in an area of 1.2MB diskettes that resulted in corruption of the entire diskette (this bug was fixed in later versions of the virus).