Worms exploit other files and programs to do the dirty work. Viruses, by contrast, require that an end-user at least kick it off, before it can try to infect other innocent files and users. Several other worms, including SQL Slammer and MS Blaster, ensured the worm’s place in computer security history.ĭevastating is its ability to spread without end-user action. Take the notorious Iloveyou worm: When it went off, it hit nearly every email user in the world, overloaded phone systems (withįraudulently sent texts), brought down television networks, and even delayed my daily afternoon paper for half a day. The distinctive trait of the computer worm is that it’s self-replicating. One person would open a wormed email and the entire company would Email brought them into fashion in the late 1990s, and for nearly a decade, computer security pros were besieged by malicious worms that arrived as message attachments. Worms have been around even longer than computer viruses, all the way back to mainframe days. Theīest antivirus programs struggle with doing it correctly and in many (if not most) cases will simply quarantine or delete the infected file instead. This has always been nontrivial, and today it’s almost impossible. That makes them particularly hard to clean up because the malware must be executed from the legitimate program. That’s a good thing: Viruses are the only type of malware that “infects” other files. Pure computer viruses are uncommon today, comprising less than 10% of all malware. Modifies other legitimate host files (or pointers to them) in such a way that when a victim’s file is executed, the virus is also executed. Fortunately, most malware programs aren’t viruses. A computer virus is what most of the media and regular end-users call every malware program reported in the news.
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