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When I originally read the name of the assignment thought I’d be writing about Herbie, the famous love bug. I thought to myself well that certainly can’t be right so after reading the requirements for the paper quickly realized I was right. It was not about the car. It was about something that effected a lot more people then a silly movie ever could. This Love Bug unlike the car was a virus that was embedded in emails as love letters and once clicked it dispersed itself in rapid form. Infecting more then 50 million computers over a span of ten days.
I’d be lucky if I talk to ten different people ver the span often days no less 50 million, that statistic is absolutely insane! With that being said we will now take a little bit deeper of a dive into the world of viruses. “Computer viruses are called viruses because they share some of the traits of biological viruses. A computer virus passes from computer to computer like a biological virus passes from person to person. ” (Brain & Fenlon, 2000) After this process it tends to differ quite a bit but the same principles hold true. With that being said lets get into the nitty gritty on how one can create a virus.
Also how difficult or easy this process may be. By doing a search on Google about how to “Create a virus” one will quickly realize it is a lot easier then they think. In fact had to really dig to learn more about the process rather then get an actual virus for me to send out. When searching the top couple links all had pre made lines of code to send to people a start viruses of their own. I did learn one thing though, when researching about viruses many sites urged people to rather learn coding instead of simply sending out a virus.
It will benefit the user a lot more to learn how the virus works and the programs that can make it. Since a virus is typically just a group of batch oding. But the ease of getting a pre made virus was pretty scary, granted it wouldn’t be anything relatable to the love bug but it will be a virus nonetheless. As scary as that is this quote in my opinion is ten times scarier. “It’s surprisingly simple to take a sample of code off the internet that is detected, make a few small changes, and have it go undetected, you wouldn’t like to know how easy it is. (Mayer, 2012) The author is referring to Anti Virus Software and just how easy it is to make a virus that the software will not detect. Moving on throughout the virus world comes the differences in the erm virus. Most people think that a virus is the end all be all when dealing with cyber crimes. They dont know the half of it. The worm is where crap really hits the fan if you will. Going back to our best friend the love bug, that was actually a worm and not a virus. The biggest difference between the two,”A worm is a standalone program that doesn’t require user intervention to spread.
Worms don’t infect existing files – they spread copies of themselves instead. ” (Hoffman, 2012. ) Meaning it does not need a host to leach onto spread. Also worms can be remotely accessed and used, viruses cannot. Worms typically se holes in the operating systems and back doors. Viruses need human interaction to be spread across computers whether it be sending a file by way of email or putting a file on a thumb drive. Though it does need to be physically transferred. In terms of how bad they are to a system and or network though it does differ. Worms that spread over the network can generate a large amount of traffic, slowing down the network. ” (Hoffman, 201 2) A worm will make things run very slow may even make your computer restart multiple times. A virus can do similar things but a virus will corrupt files on your hard drive even possibly erase the entire thing. From what I’ve read granted the worm effects a lot more computers which for networked computers it would be a nightmare. I will have to say the virus sounds more dangerous. If your computer isn’t backed up or the important files are saved any. here else you may never get that data back. I can deal with slowness for a while till a security patch comes out. The one awesome thing though is granted these different types of cyber attacks do wreak havoc on peoples lives some are tying to fix it! Whether that be from buying anti virus software or migrating to an entirely new operating system. Picking an operating system over another can save you from a lot of malicious attacks. Choosing a Windows OS from the start in todays day and age isn’t the best decision one can make.
Granted Windows is the most widely known and used OS it comes at a price. It’s also the easiest to spread malicious content through. prefer a Mac which is built off of a Unix OS in a Unix OS everything isn’t line by line code. It is more Of a circular code, everything needs to feed off of what came before it. So if a line of virus code just randomly showed up it would spit it back out since the OS isn’t used to it. Whereas in a windows environment it would take that code and run with it because all of it’s I’s and Ts don’t have to be dotted and crossed for it to move on.
It is possible to have a secure Windows computer it is just a lot harder to do then using a competing OS. There are Anti Virus software thatll help find viruses but the rate people are putting them out when you ‘update’ your anti virus it’s already out of date. With OS X on Mac it’s not as rapid. I’m not saying it’s it can’t ever get attacked or anything like that but to do harm to a Mac it is considerably harder then to do it to a windows computer. Like said there are lenty of things you can do to make ones computer more secure but one of the biggest things ultimately be what operating system you choose from the Start.
In todays day and age it is utterly surreal at how much information is transferred in a second. With each passing day the number of malicious information is growing. With simple changes in habit you can protect yourself just simply by updatingyour computer. That is one of the most important things to do. That will help against many malicious forms including both viruses and worms. With those being out there I would urge users to back up their information as well. This is also a simple task that can save a lot of personal data if your computer ever becomes compromised.