![]() ![]() They've been around forever, even longer than computer viruses, but have taken hold of current computers more than any other type of malware.Ī Trojan must be executed by its victim to do its work. Trojans masquerade as legitimate programs, but they contain malicious instructions. TrojansĬomputer worms have been replaced by Trojan malware programs as the weapon of choice for hackers. For example, the SQL Slammer worm used a (patched) vulnerability in Microsoft SQL to incur buffer overflows on nearly every unpatched SQL server connected to the internet in about 10 minutes, a speed record that still stands today. 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. What makes an effective worm so devastating is its ability to spread without end-user action. Several other worms, including SQL Slammer and MS Blaster, ensured the worm's place in computer security history. Take the notorious Iloveyou worm: When it went off, it hit nearly every email user in the world, overloaded phone systems (with fraudulently 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 be infected in short order. ![]() 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. The best 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. ![]()
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