TABLE OF CONTENTS Types of malware
Infection mechanisms
Protecting yourself against malware
Malware detection software
Lockdown schemes
If there is any computer security threat with which the average person is familiar, it is a virus, one type of malicious software known generally as malware. Malware does nothing useful and, more often than not, is nasty and destructive.
There are several types of malware, each of which propagates differently and has a different goal:
Virus: A virus is a self-propagating piece of software that runs as an executable program on a target machine. It is not, however, a stand-alone piece of software. It must piggyback itself on something else, such as a piece of e-mail or other application program, and is installed on a victim machine when the user accesses the host software. A virus s effect can be relatively benign such as displaying a dialog box or it can be seriously destructive, deleting files from a hard disk, causing a computer to reboot repeatedly, and so on. Some viruses are known to be polymorphic, meaning that they can change themselves as they propagate so that each copy looks a bit different from all others.
Worm: A worm is a self-propagating piece of stand-alone software that has effects similar to a virus. It can be the cause of a denial of service attack or can damage items stored on a computer.
Trojan horse: A Trojan horse is a piece of software that...
