The Most Common Types of Virus

                                                The Most Common Types of Virus

            According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, a computer virus is "a computer program usually hidden within another seemingly innocuous program that produces copies of itself and inserts them into other programs or files "(Indiana University, IU). The most common types of virus nowadays are general viruses, e-mail viruses, trojan horses and worms. The computer viruses are called such as because they share some of the traits of biological viruses. Similar to the way a biological virus must hitch a ride on a cell, a computer virus must piggyback on top of some other program or document in order to launch.
            E-mail viruses are probably the most familiar type of virus. They were created in order to change the computer environment of virus by creating the e-mail virus. For example, the ILOVEYOU virus, which appeared on May 4, 2000, infected over three hundred thousand computer systems in the U.S. alone (Kleinbard and Richtmyer). It contained a piece of code as an attachment. People who opened the attachment launched the code. It then sent copies of the ILOVEYOU virus to everyone in the victim’s address book and started corrupting files on the victim’s machine. It was potentially contagious. Some companies suffered with the virus so much that it brought some levels of business to a screeching halt. At Ford Motor Company, security officials kept the e-mail system offline for almost one day. In a similar way, the AT&T Corporation shut down its e-mail system.
            General viruses are known as illegal programs that explore resources of systems. It is an executable code able to reproduce itself, they are essentially programming codes, and unlike other computer programs, they contains functions protecting them from being found and destroyed. Computer viruses replicate by attaching themselves to a program or a computer and using the host resources to copy itself to other programs or computers. Viruses can be classified in three categories. For instance: harmless, dangerous and very dangerous. People create computer viruses sometimes with the goal to have fun, or to steal data, it can also have the purpose of damaging specifically or many targets.
            Trojan horses have a name based in Greek mythology. There is a story about the Trojan War. The Greeks brought the people of Troy a large wooden horse, which they accepted as a peace offering. Inside of the wooden horse, the Greek soldiers were waiting until the night. After people of the city had fallen asleep, Greek soldiers jumped out of the wooden horse, opened the gates to let their fellow soldiers in, and took over city. The moral of this story is mainly to beware of Trojan horses. In the computing world, Trojan horses are software programs that masquerade as regular programs, like a game, antivirus function or any other regular software. If you run a Trojan horse, it can do malicious things to your computer.
            Worms are computer programs that can copy itself from machine to machine. Normally they move around and infect other machines through the computer networks. Using a network a worm can expand from one single copy very quickly. For example, the Code Red worm replicated itself more than 250,000 times in approximately nine hours on July 19, 2001 (Rhodes). The Code Red worm had three instructions to do on the machines: replicate itself for the first twenty days of each month, replace Web pages on infected servers with a page featuring the message “Hacked by Chinese” and launch a concerted attack on the White House Web site in an attempt to overwhelm it (eEyeDigitalSecurity). After the successful infection, the Code Red wait for the appointed hour and connect to the www.whitehouse.gov domain. This attack consist of the infected systems simultaneously sending one hundred connections to port eighty of www.whitehouse.gov (198.137.240.91). As a solution the U.S. government changed the IP address of www.whitehouse.gov to prevent this particular threat from the worm.
            Viruses are still in most cases a Windows problem, the other operational computer systems viruses represent a small part of the computer viruses available. If you are really worried about general viruses, you should be running a more secure operating system like Linux. You should never double-click on an e-mail attachment with an executable program. A file with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS is executable, and once you run it you have given it permission to do any command at your machine. The only solution against this problem is never run executables that arrive via e-mail. Always make sure to run an Anti-virus software such as Kaspersky, Norton or Avast. You can rely on Sandboxie software that is designed to run any program or web page without contact risks, because the Sandboxie does not allow any task inside it to harm the real system or data inside it. You must always remember to backup your important data in external drives, pen drives and memory cards or in cloud servers.
            In conclusion, computer viruses can cause massive damage to computers in general. The best way to prevent viruses is to make sure to backup all your data and use anti-virus available and be aware when you are checking your e-mail or running strange programs.
 

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