Simple IT Support

What is a Computer Worm in plain English

Posted by sporg

From our last article we had a look at the good old virus. If you have read the article you will know that the common computer virus is very reliant on the user of a computer to copy it around. In this article we will have a look at the computer worm. A real nasty peace of software as the worm can copy itself around and infect other computers without any help at all. All the worm needs is a computer connected to some sort of network. This could just be an internet connection or the thought to be safe network at your work place.

This kind of virus came out when the computer networks started to become common place. Internet was also readily available and businesses started communicating using e-mail. As with all viruses there is more than one type of worm so let’s have a closer look at some of the variants.

Email Worms

This version of the worm is reliant on a computer having an email client installed. The virus hides inside an email as an attachment or link to a webpage. Some can hide inside the e-mail as a script and infect your computer just by looking at the e-mail. When you double click the attachment or the link the virus is also started and it can do one of two things. It can attaché itself to every e-mail you send out or it can have a look thought your contacts list and send out emails with itself attached. Some worms have even been known to look thought your documents to try and find e-mail addresses. The e-mails that are sent out sometimes have random addresses put into the sent from section making it hard to find out where the virus originated from.

Instant messaging worms

If you have ever used a program like msn or yahoo messenger this type of worm could infect you. The worm sends out a link to random people using the messaging service. When the link is clicked on you are directed to a website that infects your machine. Once infected, the worm can use your messenger program to send the link to your friends. There are also versions of this type of worm that can use IRC chat systems.

File sharing networks

File sharing networks allow users to share files over a global network. This type of sharing is also know as P2P and has had a lot of bad press due to copyright material being shared over these networks a lot. The worm will copy itself into the programs shared directory in a harmlessly named file. When someone downloads it and executes it gets to infect the computer and try to get shared out again.

Internet worm

This is the most dangerous of all. Microsoft windows is a very complicated operating system with billions of lines of code. No matter how hard they try to make windows secure there will always be a way for someone to get windows to do something that it should not. Programmers have learnt how to take advantage of these bugs and have developed worms that can copy themselves onto your computer and install themselves without any help from anyone. These worms then search the network looking for other computers to infect. Once you get a few machines infected these worms can cause delays on the network that can get so bad that you are unable to use the network. These viruses prove to be very hard to detect and even harder to get rid of.

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Grayware artical on Slashdot

Posted by sporg

While we are on the subject of viruses at Simple IT Support I thought readers may be interested in this artical on Slashdot news that talks about Grayware. Grayware is software that in inbetween Malware and usefull applications. I think all these names for programs that dont quite do what the user inteded them for is going a little mad lol.

Anyway have a read and see what you think

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New Adventures

Posted by sporg

Hi everyone

As you can tell not much has been happening round here on the blog. Most of that is due to me working away on a few other projects. So I thought it might be a good idea to explain what I have been up to.

First off I am now the proud owner of a game server. I have been looking into setting one up for a while and I hope to be able to write a few articles about the experience. If you play Counter Strike Source and would like to give me a run for my money please see the info below for the server IP. I am always around during the evenings UK time. So hope to see you online.

I have only had the server now for about 24 hours and so far I am very happy with www.inx-gaming.co.uk/. Only run into two little problems so far and those are to do with installing mods and the download core that is used to make map downloads quicker for clients. More on the issues and more later.

The second item I have been working on is still a work in progress. I am setting up a wiki for Simple IT support. My hope is to use the blog for general information but use the wiki for step by step solutions. It is my hope that other people who like to help others will join the wiki community and contribute fixes that they have come across. As mentioned before this is a work in progress as getting the skin to look and feel like Simple IT supports it very time consuming.

Well that’s all for now. I should have another post out this week to continue our look at viruses so see you there. If I don’t get it done you can always come and shoot me in the head on my server.

Technorati Tags: News, Counter Strike Source, Game Server, Wiki

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