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1.4 Virus description·What is the descriptive history of a virus (new)?
·What is the descriptive history of a virus (old)?
| | | In computer security, a computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an "infection", and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a "host". Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, trojan horses and other sorts of malware; viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware.
While viruses can be intentionally destructive, for example, by destroying data, many other viruses are fairly benign or merely annoying. Some viruses have a delayed payload, which is sometimes called a bomb. For example, a virus might display a message on a specific day or wait until it has infected a certain number of hosts. A time bomb occurs during a particular date or time, and a logic bomb occurs when the user of a computer takes an action that triggers the bomb. The predominant negative effect of viruses is their uncontrolled self-reproduction, which wastes or overwhelms computer resources.
Today, viruses are somewhat less common than network-borne worms, due to the popularity of the Internet. Anti-virus software, originally designed to protect computers from viruses, has in turn expanded to cover worms and other threats such as spyware, identity theft and adware.
Included in the many types of viruses are:
-Trojan horses - A Trojan horse is just a computer program. The program pretends to do one thing (like claim to be a picture) but actually does damage when you start it (it can completely erase your files). Trojan horses cannot replicate automatically. Computer viruses are called viruses because they share some traits of types of biological viruses.
-Worms - A worm is a piece of software that uses computer networks and security flaws to create copies of itself. A copy of the worm will scan the network for any other machine that has a specific security flaw. It replicates itself to the new machine using the security flaw, and then starts replicating.
-E-mail viruses - An e-mail virus will use an e-mail message as a mode of transport, and usually will copy itself by automatically mailing itself to hundreds of people in the victim's address book.
A computer virus will pass from one computer to another like a real life biological virus passes from person to person. For example, it is estimated by experts that the Mydoom worm infected a quarter-million computers in a single day in January of 2004. In March of 1999, the Melissa virus spread so rapidly that it forced Microsoft and a number of other very large companies to completely turn off their e-mail systems until the virus could be dealt with. Another example is the ILOVEYOU virus which occurred in 2000 had a similarly disastrous effect.
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last modified: 2006-08-11 01:37:36 | | | A program called "Elk Cloner" is credited with being the first computer virus to appear "in the wild" -- that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created. Written in 1982 by Rich Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread by floppy disk.
The first PC virus was a boot sector virus called (c)Brain, created in 1986 by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, operating out of Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers reportedly created the virus to deter pirated copies of software they had written. However, analysts have claimed that the Ashar virus, a variant of Brain, possibly predated it based on code within the virus.
Before computer networks became widespread, most viruses spread on removable media, particularly floppy disks. In the early days of personal computers, many users regularly exchanged information and programs on floppies. Some viruses spread by infecting programs stored on these disks, while others installed themselves into the disk boot sector, ensuring that they would be run when the user booted the computer from the disk.
Traditional computer viruses were mostly first seen at the last half of the 1980s, and they came about because of a few reasons. “The first reason was the spread of personal computers. Prior to the 1980s, home computers were nearly non-existent or they were toys. Real computers were rare, and they were locked away for use by "experts." During the 1980s, real computers started to spread to businesses and homes because of popularity. By the late 1980s, PCs were widespread in businesses, homes and college campuses.
The second reason was the use of bulletin boards on the computer. People could dial up a bulletin board with a modem and download all sorts of different programs. Most popular were games, and then simple word processors, spreadsheets, etc. Bulletin boards led to what is now known as the virus called a Trojan horse. The third reason that led to the creation of viruses was most definitely the floppy disk. At the end of the 1980s, programs were very small, and could fit the operating system, a word processor and many documents onto a single floppy disk. Most computers didn’t have hard disks, so you would turn on your machine and it would load the operating system and everything else straight from the floppy disk. Viruses took advantage of these three facts to create the first self-replicating programs.
As bulletin board systems and online software exchange became popular in the late 1980s and early 1990s, more viruses were written to infect popularly traded software. Shareware and bootleg software were equally common vectors for viruses on BBSes. Within the "pirate scene" of hobbyists trading illicit copies of commercial software, traders in a hurry to obtain the latest applications and games were easy targets for viruses.
Since the mid-1990s, macro viruses have become common. Most of these viruses are written in the scripting languages for Microsoft programs such as Word and Excel. These viruses spread in Microsoft Office by infecting documents and spreadsheets. Since Word and Excel were also available for Mac OS, most of these viruses were able to spread on Macintosh computers as well. Numerically, most of these viruses did not have the ability to send infected e-mail. The ones that did usually worked by accessing the Microsoft Outlook COM interface.
Macro viruses pose very unique problems for detection software. For example, some versions of Microsoft Word caused macros to replicate themselves with additional blank lines. The virus behaved identically but would be misidentified as a new virus. In another example, if two macro viruses simultaneously infect a document, the combination of the two, if also self-replicating, can appear as a "mating" of the two and would likely be detected as a virus unique from the "parents."
A computer virus may also be transmitted through instant messaging. A virus may send a web address link as an instant message to all the contacts on an infected machine. If the recipient, thinking the link is from a friend (a trusted source) and follows the link to the website, the virus hosted at the site may be able to infect this new computer and continue propagating.
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last modified: 2006-08-11 01:38:04 |
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