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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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