What's the Difference Between Viruses and Malware?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
884 words · ~4 min read
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these days people seem to use words like malware and spyware a lot more than
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virus making the latter conjure memories of Windows 95 aolcds and jeff goldblum
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taking down an alien mothership so why is that what qualifies something as a
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traditional virus as opposed to the more recent malware designation and are
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viruses still around great question to understand what a virus is we'll start
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with a look at the original biological meaning of the word biological viruses
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like the ones that can make you sick are parasitic they inject their own code in
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this case either dna or rna into a host
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cell as a means of replication this code
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causes the cell to make a ton of copies of the virus and ultimately burst
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sending new viruses everywhere rinse and repeat computer viruses operate via a
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similar principle unlike some forms of malware which are fully executable
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programs viruses tend to be smaller pieces of code that can fuse with other
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programs or files and only replicate when conditions are right so they can be
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triggered by a certain date and time opening a certain program or even
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hitting a certain amount of disk usage of all things
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after a virus is triggered it will try to copy itself and spread infecting
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other files and programs along the way sometimes over a network and just like
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real viruses these virus copies can be a little different from the original
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making it hard for antivirus software to eliminate them similar to how the many
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variants of the cold virus make it difficult to create a vaccine for some
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even come encrypted making detection even more complicated
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of course viruses biological or digital wouldn't be a problem if all they did
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was just copy themselves but just like the chickenpox virus will make you sick
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a computer virus can contain a payload that will cause some kind of effect
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which could be anything from just displaying a joke to permanently
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corrupting your important data these days viruses can trigger ddos attacks
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which you can learn more about up here by infecting lots of computers and
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getting them all to attack a specific server at once and since these annoying
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effects can be caused by other types of malware many people have used the terms
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virus and malware interchangeably but
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this is incorrect for example the famous i love you attack back in 2000 was
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caused by a standalone script or program
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disguised as a love letter and sent out via email attachment so because it
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emailed itself to other people in the victim's contact list rather than
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relying on inserting itself into other programs to spread there was no host
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program that i love you infected it would be more accurately referred to as
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a worm rather than a virus and indeed many modern forms of malware
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like ransomware and adware are also standalone programs that can be passed
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around and executed on their own meaning that they aren't
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really viruses which doesn't mean though that true viruses aren't still around
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causing mayhem and the ill effects they can cause are only really limited by the
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creativity the black hats programming them have things like logging keystrokes
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to steal your financial data and attacking corporate networks as a
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destructive form of protest are just the tip of the iceberg
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so what can you do well even though modern viruses tend to spread over the
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internet unlike the old days where they were mostly spread around by passing
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corrupted floppy disks and flash drives around what hasn't changed is the
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importance of having strong up-to-date anti-virus software installed to help
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prevent accidental exposure after all when risk of viral infection is on the
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