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Computer viruses and their effect
Computer viruses and their effect
Computer viruses and their effect
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Most of us swap disks with friends and browse the Net looking for downloads. Rarely do we ever consider that we are also exchanging files with anyone and everyone who has ever handled them in the past. If that sounds like a warning about social diseases, its right along the same lines. Computer viruses are every bit as harmful and destructive, and come in a vast variety of types and strains. Computer viruses, can tear up your hard drive and bring down your system. However, unlike social diseases, computer viruses are almost always curable, and the cures for new strains are usually a matter of days away, rather than months or years.
A computer virus is a program designed to replicate and spread, generally with the victim being oblivious to its existence. Computer viruses spread by attaching themselves to other programs such as word processors or spreadsheets, or to the boot sector of the disk. When an infected file is activated, or when the computer is started from an infected disk, the virus itself is also activated. Many times a virus will lurk in a computers memory, waiting to infect the next program or disk that is activated.
What makes viruses so dangerous is their ability to perform an event. While some events are harmless like displaying a message on a certain date, and others annoying, like slowing performance or altering the screen display, some viruses can be disastrous by damaging files, and destroying data.
Most viruses are created out of curiosity. There are those out there who create them out of malice, but far more of the creators are just meeting a challenge, to see if they can do it or not. A common type of virus would be a Trojan Horse, a destructive program disguised as a game, a utility, or an application. When run a Trojan Horse does something harmful to the computer system, while appearing to do something useful. A worm is also a popular type of virus. A worm is a program that spreads itself across computers, usually by spawning copies of itself in each computer’s memory. A worm might duplicate itself in one computers memory so often that it causes the computer to crash. A worm is introduced secretly into a host system either for fun, or with the intent to damage or destroy information. Now I will explain some of the more major viruses, and how they function.
Bob is at the skate park, showing off his skills as a skateboarder. With one wrong move, he fell off of his skateboard, and his knee scrapped on the concrete, causing a big gash on his knee. A virus enters in the knee, and it has a mission. Its mission is to infect every organ in Bob's body.
This virus searches for a new vulnerable host in order to survive and carry the disease to the next victim. The critical aspect around the spread of a virus is how drastically the reproduction process occurs. Without being controlled, the contamination throughout any species causes the spread to take place in a toxic way, “On day one, there were two people. And then, four, and then, sixteen. In three months, it’s a billion.
Viruses can do many different things to a body, they can destroy, corrupt, and take over cells in the body. They can damage parts of the body or make your body destroy itself, viruses are dangerous but sometimes can be cured. Viruses do not have the enzymes needed to carry out life so they use other’s cells, called a host cell, to live and to perform their functions, such as reproduction. Viruses inject their genetic instructions into a cell causing the cell to create viruses materials, which become new viruses, and usually break the side of the cell destroying it. The viruses can cause parts of the brain to react and activate, causing behavioral changes. For example a disease called Toxoplasmosis can alter rat behavior, while it affects humans in a different way than rats, its an example of what viruses can do. The virus switches the triggers that causes neuronal reactions for fear and arousal, so that what causes fear actually cuses arousal. This is so that the rat gets eaten by a cat and a parasite (which injects the virus) inside the rat can reproduce in a cat. A virus doesn’t simply just head to the brain to cause these things, as there is a “shield” around the brain that protects it from everything. This “shield” is called the Blood Brain Barrier, the BBB, which molecul...
Multi-platform computer worms are a tool that computer hackers use to infect computers to gain control access. Computer worms are a dangerous virus because they are self-replicating, meaning that they multiply themselves and spread onto other computer networks seeking a lapse in internet security. Computer worms do not need to attach themselves onto an existing computer program to gain access to the victim computer files. The computer worm was created on accident by a Cornell student named Robert Morris; he was seeking a way of managing the internet in 1988. “Morris had no malicious intent, but a bug in his program caused many of the computers the worm landed on to crash. … but worms had come of age and have since evolved into an effective way of attacking systems connected to the internet” (Barwise). Today, hackers use the Morris worm to infect computers. “Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia …” (Richmond). Since the good intended creation of the worm it has only been used maliciously as a computer virus by money seeking computer hackers such as the Koobface gang in Russia.
The hanta virus is not a new foe to humanity. This mysterious and sometimes fatal disease has plagued humanity for over 1000 years. This virus, most likely originating in China over 1000 years ago, is transmitted by human contact with mice. Only relatively recently has the hanta virus captured the attention of the United States. Although the hanta virus has been known for such a long time, there is little known about the virus. In the United States most cases are found in the southwestern part of the country, although cases have been reported from all four corners of the country. Recently, there have been successful tests done on prospective vaccines for the hanta virus. Despite this, strains of the hanta virus kill many people a year for lack of an effective medicine or vaccine (www.pharminfo.com).
Malware could be defined as several different objects such as worms, viruses, Trojans, or blended, so I’m going to compare malware to a car manufacturer. There are countless models that a car manufacturer makes, so it would be difficult to distinctly describe, Ford as solely a truck or sedan company. We know manufactures make several types of different vehicles. Let’s get back to malware and let me give you an example.
I decided to read the book by David Harley called Viruses Revealed. This book goes into great detail about the different kinds of viruses and virus mechanisms, the solutions to these viruses, studies on different cases of viruses and then the social aspects of viruses. In the first part of the book, Harley talks about the problems with viruses. A virus is a program that infects other programs to modify them. “Infecting means that a virus will insert itself into the chain of command” (Harley). The virus structure was defined into three different parts: Infection, Payload, and Trigger. The infection is defined as the way or ways in which the virus spreads. The payload is defined as what the virus does besides duplicating itself. Trigger is defined as the procedure that decides whether or not the payload is necessary. Harley also talks about the difference between damage versus infection. The major difference between the two is that many users have infected documents or applications on their computer. Whether or not those applications are run is the difference between the two. In part one Harley also converses about Trojan Horses. Trojan horses are normally known as a virus, but he shoots that down. Harley says that Trojan Horses are normally not viruses, but just a worm that goes from computer to computer. After talking about different kinds of viruses and worms, he goes into Anti-Virus softwares. There are two different kinds of anti-viruses. One being virus-specific. Virus-specific means that every time a virus is found on your computer, it is identified but not detected. Generic scanners do the opposite. Generic scanners detect viruses but do not identify them.
Why do people create computer viruses? Why they benefit from it? It is like asking why do people commit crimes? (Why People Create Computer). In the 20th century at the beginning of early computer viruses. They were for experiments, annoyance, and testing. They do not really harm computer systems or computers back then. In the 21st century computer viruses, are changing. They are becoming smarter and more destructive rarely without annoyance but they serve a purpose to cause some harm to a computer or computer systems (Benford).
Hantavirus is a virus in the Bunyaviridae family of viruses. Dr. Lee Ho Wang from Korea discovered Hantavirus in the early 1950s. Though the virus is commonly found in rodents, it does not cause disease in the rodents. Disease results when the virus is transmitted to humans. A common way of contracting Hantavirus is from breathing in dust that has been contaminated by an infected rodent’s saliva, feces or urine or the infected dust gets into broken skin. It is also transmitted by the bite of an infected rodent. So far, it has not been confirmed that Hantavirus can be passed on from person to person. The most common places to contract Hantavirus are Korea, China or most countries in Asia. In Korea, Hantavirus seems to have two major “seasons;” May to June and October to November are the times of year when the disease is more prevalent because the rodent populations are higher during these times. There are two forms of Hantavirus, the mild illness found in Scandinavia, and the more severe illness found in the Far East and Central Europe.
In the past, hackers sent viruses through e-mail, but now they have upped the ante by creating malicious websites which can infect your computer and collect your personal data. An even larger threat is social networking. While this may seem harmless enough, social media is a huge threat to your privacy because people often overshare information about their personal lives which everyone on their friends list, whether you know them well or not, can see everything that you post and everything anyone posts to you. The fourth major threat to your privacy is video and photo sharing. Once again, this seems like a harmless task, and it is if you post appropriate and non-revealing photographs and videos.
Malicious software in short known as Malware. It is also known as computer Contaminant. Similar to biological parasite, malware also reside in a Host. Malware will get installed on host without user’s consent. Generally a software is considered malware based on the intent of the creator...
Malicious code is a real danger to modern systems. Most systems nowadays do not work in isolation; they are more likely to be connected to other systems and sometimes they can even be dependent on them. Therefore an attack on one of the systems in the network is a potential attacking attempt to any other systems, with which it is interacting. Therefore, it is inevitable for any networked or Internet-connected computers to deal with malicious code attacks at some point. Businesses lose billions of dollars each year because of malicious code attacks. Responding to the attack and restoring all the data on the computers is a time-consuming and expensive task. It is a much better practice to try preventing it through organizing and maintaining effective defenses. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is no one general solution that can help to prevent all the attacks. Attackers are constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of systems’ vulnerabilities and find new ones. That’s why organizations have to not only defend themselves against existing attack methods, but also try to predict and prevent new attacking techniques. It means that computer and network security is a never-ending challenge and expense.
Virus is one of the most common malware. Unlike spyware, virus is largely designed to harm useful programs or wreck down an entire operating system. There are many ways through which virus may enter a computer. The most common way is via email attachments. A...
What is the “MALWARE”? A malware refers to software programs designed to damage or do other unwanted actions on a computer system. In Spanish, "mal" is a prefix that means "bad," making the term "bad ware" .Malware includes viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and spyware. Viruses, for example, can cause havoc on a computer's hard drive by deleting files or directory information. Spyware can gather data from a user's system without the user knowing it. This can include anything from the Web pages a user visits to personal information, such as credit card numbers.
Malware can survive in a number of ways say different sizes, shapes and also the purpose ranging from viruses to spyware and to bots. Malware in general is classified into two types. They are the concealing malware and infectious malware. In case of infectious malware, the malware code is said to spread all over which means that the software code shall replicate from one user to another and this goes on. In infectious malware, we need to consider two cases, which are called the viruses and the worms. Viruses are termed as the software that has executables within itself and causes the executables to spread when it is run. The second case called worms is a software which infects a computer and then spreads to others.