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  • Essay / Different Types of Computer Viruses: How They Are Created, Effects, and Preventative Measures

    Virus Document Computer viruses are unfortunately an everyday occurrence, due to their high prevalence and ability to do a variety of things. They can range from simple packet sniffing to data mining to keylogging. In my article, I will discuss computer viruses, how they are constructed, the different types of viruses, how they work, and the steps that can be taken to prevent them. I think computer viruses are an extremely dangerous part of the Internet of Things, and everyone should be very careful when it comes to how they use the Internet and how they act online. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essayA computer virus, as stated by Xiaofan Yang and Lu-Xing Yang in their article titled “Towards Epidemiological Modeling of Viruses computer" is: "a malicious program that can replicate and spread from one computer to another...a virus can perform devastating operations such as modifying data, deleting data, deleting files, encrypting "files and disk formatting" (Yang). This is important because the bottom line about viruses is that they are almost always intended to do harm. The authors believe that as technology improves, concern about computer viruses increases exponentially and that current antivirus technology cannot predict how computer viruses will evolve in the coming years. There are many types of viruses and their effects. The Trojan horse is the most common. It hides in applications and files that you normally associate with secure files and injects itself into the computer once you open the file or run the program. There are also different types of attacks when dealing with networks rather than single-user PCs. For example, "spoofing" is a type of attack in which the faulty node misrepresents itself to the network, such that the sender's topology changes. The most common type of attack that viruses can use are botnets. A botnet is a collection of computers that have been hacked and can be used at the same time to do the whims of a hacker. For example, a hacker can use a botnet to carry out a DOS attack or a denial of services attack. This essentially shuts down any website the hacker wants, as the botnet consumes all of the site's bandwidth and forces the website to display error messages because it cannot handle the amount of traffic routed through the server. There are many real websites. examples of viruses used to wreak havoc. In Lauren Sporck's article “The Most Destructive Malware Ever,” she discusses the biggest malware hacks ever. For example, in 2004, the fastest spreading virus in history emerged. It's called the "My Doom Worm". As the authors put it, it was usually "transmitted by email and usually contained various subject lines, including "Error", "Mail Delivery System", "Test" or "Mail Transaction Failed" (Sporck ). This is interesting because the creator of the virus played with people opening almost every email they received without notice, and in this case he played on the fact that people were curious about whether, e.g. , emailthat they had sent was unsuccessful and I wanted to know what the error was. “Superfish Adware” is another case of viruses getting installed. The author states that “Superfish adware became famous through a class-action lawsuit filed against Lenovo, the world's largest PC maker. Superfish spyware was pre-installed on Lenovo machines without Lenovo customers being informed of its existence. Superfish installed its own root certificate authority, which allowed it to override SSL/TLS connections, creating an opening or “hole” for attackers. This exposed Lenovo users to potential cybercriminals while providing Superfish and Lenovo a way to target unsuspecting users with personalized ads” (Sporck). This is very interesting because it reveals multiple sides of the story. On one hand you have a wide open hole vulnerable to hackers who could be easily manipulated, and on the other you have the reliance on tailored advertising that many frown upon. A third real-world virus is the "Code Red Worm". This worm affected nearly 360,000 computers by targeting computers that were running a specific Microsoft web server and only that web server. It's interesting because the hackers chose to do this because it was probably the most commonly used web server at the time, and using a little black hat magic they were able to inject their code in the server and transmit it to each computer that was connected. run the server. The worm was able to achieve this by using a security flaw called buffer overflow. Another real-life example of a computer virus is the "SoBig.F" worm, a malware injected via email, then searched the infected computer's email directory and sent the malware email to all contacts, thus spreading the virus. virus even faster. Ultimately, the worm ended up causing approximately $37 billion in damage and reduced freight and IT traffic in Washington. A final concrete example of a virus is the “CIH virus”. It owes its name to the Chernobyl disaster and was to celebrate the anniversary of the disaster. The virus, as stated in the article: “The virus worked by wiping data from the hard drives of infected devices and overwriting the computer's BIOS chip, rendering the device unusable. This virus caused huge damage because the BIOS chip was not removable. on many PCs, requiring the user to replace the entire motherboard” (Sporck). This is a particularly heinous virus because it renders a person's PC essentially unusable and as a result that person has to buy a whole new computer and hope not to get caught by the same virus again or potentially get one a new one. All in all, there are many different types of viruses and they can do many different things. What we as a people need to do is focus on how we are going to stop viruses and what we can do to better protect ourselves online and offline. .There are many ways to protect yourself against computer viruses. The easiest way is to download antivirus software that regularly scans your computer's hard drives and system for any viruses. If it finds one, it usually quarantines it until you give it a directive on what you want the antivirus software to do. Sometimes programs detect "false positives," programs or files that you know are safe but that the antivirus program considers a virus for some reason. This is usually due tocauses the file that triggers the false positive to have some similarities to the files the antivirus algorithm is looking for. Another way to protect against viruses and avoid malware is to invent a new detection framework. For example, an article by Sushma Verma and SK Muttoo titled “An Android Malware Detection Framework-based on Permissions and Intents”. This article explains how Android phones and smartphones in general have recently become a viable source of hacking. In this article, the authors explain how antivirus protection and malware security currently work on Android and provide a clear hybrid method for Android malware detection by analyzing the permissions and intent filters of the apps you want download to your phone. The authors claim that “increased smartphone use may be combined with a considerable increase in security breaches due to the exploitation of the growing number of vulnerabilities linked to Android applications. The continued exponential growth in the use of smart mobile technology has necessitated the search for security solutions for mobile devices” (Verma, Muttoo). Later in the article, the authors, in describing how they plan to achieve this new type of malware detection state, “Our methodology aims to develop a detection system focused on feature extraction and selection. to measure and characterize malicious applications based on the permissions and intents specified in the application manifest file” (Verma, Muttoo). This is interesting because the authors state that they will find malware by simply checking the permissions and intentions of what the file or program wants to change or modify. This is interesting because it is very difficult for a hacker to hide what the program does, which will force hackers to be even smarter when it comes to bypassing Android security. Another way programmers find ways to stop hackers is to first find exploitable flaws and plug them. An article by Adam Kiezun, Philip Guo, Karthick Jayaraman, and Michael Ernst titled “Automatic Creation of SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Attacks” discusses this type of prevention. The paper states that “We present a technique for detecting security vulnerabilities in web applications. SQL injection (SQLI) and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are prevalent forms of attack in which the attacker shapes application input to access or modify user data and execute malicious code. In the most severe attacks, an attacker can corrupt a database in order to trick subsequent users into executing malicious code” (Kiezun et al.). This is interesting because what the authors are saying is that they created a technique that injects a bit of code into a web application and finds all the security holes in the website so that they can be fixed and prevent computer hackers. Discussing how it works, the authors stated that "our technique works on unmodified existing code, creates concrete inputs that expose vulnerabilities, works before software deployment, has no overhead for released software, and analyzes the internal components of the application to discover vulnerable code… Ardilla is a white-box testing tool, that is, it requires the source code of the application. Ardilla is designed to test PHP applications before deployment. The vulnerabilities of..