30/09/2013
TECH FACTS
A computer virus is a type of malware. Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected hosts, such as stealing hard disk space or CPU time, accessing private information, corrupting data, displaying political or humorous messages on the user's screen, spamming their contacts. However, not all viruses carry a destructive payload or attempt to hide themselves—the defining characteristic of viruses is that they are self-replicating computer programs which install themselves without the user's consent. Very often, the term is also used for other kinds of malware, such as Trojan horses and worms. Even though this is wrong, it may be difficult to tell the difference between different kinds of malware; they often occur together, and only an expert may be able to tell them apart. Such programs also fit more than one category.
Worm Viruses:
A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. Often, it uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security failures on the target computer to access it. Unlike a computer virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, even if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.
Trojan Viruses:
A Trojan virus is simply a hidden virus than is loaded to a users PC without their knowledge, usually disguised as something else such as a: picture, screen saver, or other attachments. They have a variety of forms but fall into two main categories: malicious (causing damage) and non-malicious. The non damaging type is often used to discover things such as illegal collection of data.
But what’s the difference?
One common mistake that people make when the topic of a computer virus arises is to refer to a worm or Trojan horse as a virus. While the words Trojan, worm and virus are often used interchangeably, they are not exactly the same thing. Viruses, worms and Trojan Horses are all malicious programs that can cause damage to your computer, but there are differences among the three, and knowing those differences can help you better protect your computer from their often damaging effects.
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