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As I was writing the article about the Rise in Computer Viruses, Spyware and Malware earlier today I realized about mid- through that not everyone reading that article would know exactly what those terms mean.

In order to help anyone who doesn’t understand the difference between a spyware program, trojan horse and a virus, I decided to write this little post in order to help out. After all, it was Sun Tzu who said “Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.”

(please keep in mind that I am greatly simplifying the terms and definitions here, entire books could be written about each of the specific items listed below)

Malware - Malware is the general catch-all term that is generally applied to any piece of software that is installed and running on a computer without the computers owners consent or knowledge. Malware is a shortened version of the term “Malicious Software”. As the name implies, malware can be the cause of anything from loss of data on your computer, annoying pop up windows or stolen credit card and financial information.

Viruses, Trojan Horses, Spyware, Worms and a multitude of other computer programs can all be correctly identified as Malware, much like the words ‘cars’ or ‘automobiles’ are used to refer to all types of Fords, Hondas, Chevy’s, etc.

If your computer support person - whether it is someone at work, at school, your next door neighbors teenager - starts talking about Malware, they are basically speaking about viruses and spyware in general.

Computer Viruses and Worms

Viruses - The term ‘computer virus’ is often used by people, especially the talking heads on the media, to describe all sort of computer problems,in place of the more correct term ‘Malware’ listed above.

A computer virus is basically a small program that performs a certain set of actions, when certain conditions are met or the the computer triggers the virus program.

An example of the ‘lie-in-wait type of virus’ would be the Davinci Virus, that ran when a Leonardi Da Vinci’s birthday was reached on the computers internal clock. Until that date was reached the virus just sat on the computer hard disk drive and waited.

Just about any type of ‘trigger’ can be used however to tell the virus to begin its work. A certain number entered on a keyboard, time of day, certain program run on the target computer, can all be effective trigger devices used by computer programmers when setting up the computer virus.

Worms - A computer worm is very similar to a virus, it spreads itself between computers and other systems. It is a little bit different than a virus however in the method it uses to spread itself.

A virus will sit on a computer until the proper conditions occur to spread itself - the trigger event - either the IM program will run, a disk will be writen in the floppy disk drive, and then the virus will copy itself and place that copy on whatever convenient source of transportation is available.

A worm on the other hand will actively search out ways of spreading itself and can open and run certain programs itself in order to send copies of itself on to other systems. An example of this is when you receive an email from every single person who has your email address on their email address book.

In this case the worm got onto your friends’ computer, actively looked for and found the email program address book and then used the email program to send itself to who ever was unfortunate enough to have their address listed.

Check back here tomorrow for the next installment in the Beginners Guide to Malware, Viruses and Spyware or you can Subscribe to our RSS feed to make sure that you don’t miss any other updates here at Tech-Bitz.com

Tomorrows topic will be: Everthing Old is New Again - Trojan Horses

Filed under: Internet, Security, Spyware Watch