these days people seem to use words like malware and spyware a lot more than
virus making the latter conjure memories of Windows 95 aolcds and jeff goldblum
taking down an alien mothership so why is that what qualifies something as a
traditional virus as opposed to the more recent malware designation and are
viruses still around great question to understand what a virus is we'll start
with a look at the original biological meaning of the word biological viruses
like the ones that can make you sick are parasitic they inject their own code in
this case either dna or rna into a host
cell as a means of replication this code
causes the cell to make a ton of copies of the virus and ultimately burst
sending new viruses everywhere rinse and repeat computer viruses operate via a
similar principle unlike some forms of malware which are fully executable
programs viruses tend to be smaller pieces of code that can fuse with other
programs or files and only replicate when conditions are right so they can be
triggered by a certain date and time opening a certain program or even
hitting a certain amount of disk usage of all things
after a virus is triggered it will try to copy itself and spread infecting
other files and programs along the way sometimes over a network and just like
real viruses these virus copies can be a little different from the original
making it hard for antivirus software to eliminate them similar to how the many
variants of the cold virus make it difficult to create a vaccine for some
even come encrypted making detection even more complicated
of course viruses biological or digital wouldn't be a problem if all they did
was just copy themselves but just like the chickenpox virus will make you sick
a computer virus can contain a payload that will cause some kind of effect
which could be anything from just displaying a joke to permanently
corrupting your important data these days viruses can trigger ddos attacks
which you can learn more about up here by infecting lots of computers and
getting them all to attack a specific server at once and since these annoying
effects can be caused by other types of malware many people have used the terms
virus and malware interchangeably but
this is incorrect for example the famous i love you attack back in 2000 was
caused by a standalone script or program
disguised as a love letter and sent out via email attachment so because it
emailed itself to other people in the victim's contact list rather than
relying on inserting itself into other programs to spread there was no host
program that i love you infected it would be more accurately referred to as
a worm rather than a virus and indeed many modern forms of malware
like ransomware and adware are also standalone programs that can be passed
around and executed on their own meaning that they aren't
really viruses which doesn't mean though that true viruses aren't still around
causing mayhem and the ill effects they can cause are only really limited by the
creativity the black hats programming them have things like logging keystrokes
to steal your financial data and attacking corporate networks as a
destructive form of protest are just the tip of the iceberg
so what can you do well even though modern viruses tend to spread over the
internet unlike the old days where they were mostly spread around by passing
corrupted floppy disks and flash drives around what hasn't changed is the
importance of having strong up-to-date anti-virus software installed to help
prevent accidental exposure after all when risk of viral infection is on the
line you always want to make sure you're
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