General Information About Viruses.

Posted by GuestBlogger in Computer Security on 06 29th, 2010 | no responses

What is a virus?

- Virus – is malware for the computer, leading obviously to unauthorized destruction, blocking, modification or copying of information, disruption of the machine, or the network.

In general, viruses are the programs parasitizing on other programs, ie introducing in “healthy” program. But recently any malicious program is called virus.

What types of viruses exist?

Trojan or Trojan horse.

You can guess about purposes of this virus from the title. There are a lot of variants of Trojans. Typically, Trojan can be used for unauthorized access to another’s computer. For example, you receive a letter with an attached file in the post office. It is written in the letter “Look my dear friend, what a wonderful game I made!” You open the file, but nothing happens (to you). In fact, the program starts and opens the door in your system for the attacker. The objectives of penetration can range from simple jokes to industrial espionage.

Worm.

The worm is a program that spread through global networks, affecting entire systems, rather than separate programs. This is the most dangerous type of virus because the objects of attack in this case are information systems of national importance. Typically, infection occurs through vulnerabilities (defects / errors) of operating system or individual programs. Worms are one of the most common and therefore dangerous viruses. Their greatest danger lies in the fact that they spread mass using the vulnerability of the system. Getting into account that the main operating system of world is MS Windows, and then the appearance of “holes” in it causes wide epidemics. Vivid representative of this species is Blaster (Lovesan) which in August 2003 has spread throughout the world, also clogging up the network with a lot of garbage traffic. The worm contains insults at the address of Bill Gates and programmed DoS-attack (DoS-attack is one of the pernicious effects of the virus. The point is that from a certain number of computers useless information is sent to one or more network computers. With a large number of requests, the computer- victim simply can no longer function properly in the network) to the server upgrade of Windows.

Classic viruses.

Unlike worms, viruses do not use the network services to penetrate other computers. A copy of the virus gets to the remote computer only if the infected object is activated on another computer.

Macro virus.

Macro virus – is a type of computer virus designed on macro embedded in these applications software packages like Microsoft Office. Such viruses use the macro languages for reproduction and with their help they are transferred from one infected file to others. Most of these viruses are written for MS Word.

Hacking tools and other malicious programs.

This category includes:

? Utilities of automation creation of viruses, worms and Trojans (constructors);

? Software libraries developed for the creation of malicious software;

? Hacking tools of hide the code of infected files from the antivirus scan (file encryption);

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