Skip to main content

Malware : Aware About This


Malware, short for malicious software, is an umbrella term used to refer to a variety of forms of hostile or intrusive software,including computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, scareware, and other malicious programs. It can take the form of executable code, scripts, active content, and other software.Malware is defined by its malicious intent, acting against the requirements of the computer user — and so does not include software that causes unintentional harm due to some deficiency.
Programs supplied officially by companies can be considered malware if they secretly act against the interests of the computer user. An example is the Sony rootkit, a Trojan horse embedded into CDs sold by Sony, which silently installed and concealed itself on purchasers' computers with the intention of preventing illicit copying; it also reported on users' listening habits, and unintentionally created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware.
Antivirus software and firewalls are used to protect against malicious activity, and to recover from attacks.

REASON :
Many early infectious programs, including the first Internet Worm, were written as experiments or pranks. Today, malware is used by both black hat hackers and governments, to steal personal, financial, or business information.
Malware is sometimes used broadly against government or corporate websites to gather guarded information, or to disrupt their operation in general. However, malware can be used against individuals to gain information such as personal identification numbers or details, bank or credit card numbers, and passwords.
Since the rise of widespread broadband Internet access, malicious software has more frequently been designed for profit. Since 2003, the majority of widespread viruses and worms have been designed to take control of users' computers for illicit purposes.Infected "zombie computers" can be used to send email spam, to host contraband data such as child pornography,or to engage in distributed denial-of-service attacks as a form of extortion.
Programs designed to monitor users' web browsing, display unsolicited advertisements, or redirect affiliate marketing revenues are called spyware. Spyware programs do not spread like viruses; instead they are generally installed by exploiting security holes. They can also be hidden and packaged together with unrelated user-installed software.
Ransomware affects an infected computer in some way, and demands payment to reverse the damage. For example, programs such as CryptoLocker encrypt files securely, and only decrypt them on payment of a substantial sum of money.
Some malware is used to generate money by click fraud, making it appear that the computer user has clicked an advertising link on a site, generating a payment from the advertiser. It was estimated in 2012 that about 60 to 70% of all active malware used some kind of click fraud, and 22% of all ad-clicks were fraudulent.
In addition to criminal money-making, malware can be used for sabotage, often for political motives. Stuxnet, for example, was designed to disrupt very specific industrial equipment. There have been politically motivated attacks that have spread over and shut down large computer networks, including massive deletion of files and corruption of master boot records, described as "computer killing". Such attacks were made on Sony Pictures Entertainment (25 November 2014, using malware known as Shamoon or W32.Disttrack) and Saudi Aramco (August 2012).

Infectious malware :

The best-known types of malware, viruses and worms, are known for the manner in which they spread, rather than any specific types of behavior. A computer virus is software that embeds itself in some other executable software (including the operating system itself) on the target system without the user's consent and when it is run, the virus is spread to other executables. On the other hand, a worm is a stand-alone malware software that actively transmits itself over a network to infect other computers. These definitions lead to the observation that a virus requires the user to run an infected software or operating system for the virus to spread, whereas a worm spreads itself.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Spring Security with JWT for REST API

Spring is considered a trusted framework in the Java ecosystem and is widely used. It’s no longer valid to refer to Spring as a framework, as it’s more of an umbrella term that covers various frameworks. One of these frameworks is Spring Security , which is a powerful and customizable authentication and authorization framework. It is considered the de facto standard for securing Spring-based applications. Despite its popularity, I must admit that when it comes to single-page applications , it’s not simple and straightforward to configure. I suspect the reason is that it started more as an MVC application -oriented framework, where webpage rendering happens on the server-side and communication is session-based. If the back end is based on Java and Spring, it makes sense to use Spring Security for authentication/authorization and configure it for stateless communication. While there are a lot of articles explaining how this is done, for me, it was still frustrating to set it up for the f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Java Functional Interfaces

  The term   Java functional interface   was introduced in Java 8. A   functional interface   in Java is an interface that contains only a single abstract (unimplemented) method. A functional interface can contain default and static methods which do have an implementation, in addition to the single unimplemented method. Here is a Java functional interface example: public interface MyFunctionalInterface { public void execute(); } The above counts as a functional interface in Java because it only contains a single method, and that method has no implementation. Normally a Java interface does not contain implementations of the methods it declares, but it can contain implementations in default methods, or in static methods. Below is another example of a Java functional interface, with implementations of some of the methods: public interface MyFunctionalInterface2{ public void execute(); public default void print(String text) { System.out.println(t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Java Logger

In Java, logging is an important feature that helps developers to trace out the errors. Java is the programming language that comes with the logging approach. It provides a Logging API that was introduced in Java 1.4 version. It provides the ability to capture the log file. In this section, we are going to deep dive into the Java Logger API. Also, we will cover logging level, components, Logging handlers or appenders, logging formatters or layouts, Java Logger class, What is logging in Java? In Java, Logging is an API that provides the ability to trace out the errors of the applications. When an application generates the logging call, the Logger records the event in the LogRecord. After that, it sends to the corresponding handlers or appenders. Before sending it to the console or file, the appenders format that log record by using the formatter or layouts. Need for Logging It provides the complete tracing information of the application. It records the critical failure if any occur in ...
Post a Comment
Read more