SOURCE00.007 - Picky, Picky, Picky!

eZine lover (@eZine)

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 · 2 years ago

Were have been ALOT of people confusing viruses, with worms. It's one of my BIGGEST pet peeves, besides from confusing sympathy with empathy (As all of my friends know), so I'm going to educate those who do not know. First the sympathy - empathy relationship.

Empathy adj. ('em-pä-thà):

1. a capacity for participating in the feelings or ideas of another.

Sympathy arj. (Sim-pä-thà):

1. a relationship between persons or things wherein whatever affects one similarly affects the others.
2. the ability to enter into and share in the feelings and interests of another.

Now on to the more related subjects of this matter. John McAffee, yes, the John McAffee who writes SCAN (tm) confused the internet WORM, calling it the internet virus. He, of all PD people should know the difference. I did get pissed when the media covered it as a virus, albeit John should know better. (Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he wrote scan in C, who knows?)

Definition time:

• Virus - Computer program that replicates for the sake of infecting other computers. May have a trojan horse in it, may not. It infects computers by attaching itself to something (like a file or boot sector).
• Trojan - Usually (though not always) a malicious program that hides itself by looking like another program, either by hard coding the messages to confuse the user, or by means of overwritting some code of a program, such as replacing the WIN.COM file with your trojan. Might not go off right away.
  
• Timebomb - A trojan-type program that will go off when certain criteria is met, like a certain time, or when the drive is filled up a certain percentage.
  
• Bomb - A trojan that goes off right away.
  
• Bacterium - My own little conception. A replicated piece of code that is designed to do something, like mark one random sector bad per run, but does NOT have any replication code (More on bacterium in The SOURCE, Issue 01.)
  
• Worm - Ahhh, the most commonly mistaken program. It's a program that does replicate, but it does not infect any programs. They are most commonly found on nets, and they serve a purpose, like the internet WORM. It tried to hack out peoples accounts for Robert Morris Jr. (note: ironically enough, the son of the head of the National Computer Security Center).

- Havoc