Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Computer Viruses and Computer Worm

There are two kind of microbe for computer, soft microbe and hard microbe. Soft microbe mean microbe made by human this is a software able to make program damage, but hard microbe is a dirt that can make damage of all your computer parts.

Computer Viruses
A virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into programs or documents that already exist on a computer. The name comes from an analogy with biological viruses. These cannot reproduce by themselves but make use of the functions of infected cells to spread. Similarly, a computer virus makes use of the executable code in legitimate programs to carry out its purposes. A virus may be designed to be destructive to a system or to be a prank. In either case, the virus will rapidly reproduce itself until the system may be overwhelmed. Viruses spread to other systems when infected programs are copied to another machine. Documents with executable code like Word macros can also be vectors of infection. A very common method of spreading viruses is by attachments to email . Today a variant of a virus known as a worm is more often used.


Computer Worms
Viruses and worms are often lumped together in the single category of virus but there is technical distinction. A worm differs from a virus in that it contains all the code it needs to carry out its purposes and does not depend on using other programs. Most recent instances of malware have been worms, spread primarily by email. Worms are designed to replicate rapidly and to use the Internet or other networks to spread with great facility. They may contain code to damage or erase files or may carry other malicious payloads. On a number of occasions, large numbers of computer systems have been brought down by worms. In addition to the damage from whatever payload they carry, the sheer number of worm copies can bring systems to a halt.

A very common method of spreading is by use of any email addresses on an infected computer. The worm searches address books, temporary Internet caches and other possible sources of email addresses. The worm then mails out random infected fake messages. It may use the addresses it finds not only as recipients but also may spoof mail to show them as senders. It may also combine random pieces of addresses into new fake addresses. All the messages will contain an attachment that is infected. None of this activity may be known by the owner of the infected machine and may go on for weeks or months. A single infected machine can send out thousands of worm-carrying messages.