The reason I am asking this is because I am curious if there can exist a virus in the computer without me ever being able to know it exists. To be more specific, a virus that emits no signs of any sort.
Answer
There is a class of malware that can hide itself completely from the operating system known as a rootkit.
Rootkits are used to hide the evidence of other malware at work and are embedded very deeply in the operating system. Because of their deep embedding they are able to manipulate process lists, filesystem tables and other important structures on-the-fly.
By manipulating filesystem structures in memory they can return false or misleading results for directories, specifically not showing files related to the main malware itself. The files are there, and booting into an uninfected operating system such as a Linux LiveCD will show the files though, as they have to be stored somewhere.
Similarly, rootkits can simply drop certain processes from being reported to programs such as the Task Manager. The operating system core knows about them, as it needs to in order to schedule them, it has just been blocked from letting the outside world know about them.
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