Thanks
A worm is a multicellular organism. A virus isn’t really alive. A trojan is just a wooden horse.
You wear a Trojan over your worm, to keep from getting a virus.
Health 101.
Glad we could clear that up.
Oh, and Urban Ranger, Bosda?
Comedians. How great!
Now I’m going to hug some snakes. That’s right, I’m going to hug and kiss some poisonous snakes. [sub]Now that’s sarcasm[/sub]
Remind me never to send you to buy condoms…
sigh
Well, at least I tried to help you out seriously, Docklands …
Note that even internet security experts can’t keep the definitions of “worm” and “virus” straight. Often you’ll see something listed as a virus despite the fact it fits the definition of worm.
See, my theory in GQ is that I try to steer clear of posts I don’t have the answer to, until somebody posts an actual informative answer, then I can jump in and post some sort of wiseass remark. Thanks for coming up with an answer!
Ice Wolf’s quote only tells part of the story.
Suppose a jerk wrote and distributed a “special program”. It might look innocent, but when run did something bad. E.g., wiped your hard drive. Emailed info on your computer to the author, etc. That’s a trojan. You only get the trojan if you download the whole program and the trojan doesn’t make copies of itself. People copying the program cause the spread.
A virus is a self-propagating program that needs to attach to another program to work. If you run a virus infected program, it looks for other programs to infect and copies itself. If the infected program is never run, the virus doesn’t propagate further. Many viruses spread nowadays thru email attachments. You “view” the email (which in poorly designed software runs the code in the attachment), the virus then looks for other addresses on your computer and mails itself to them. Note that a lot of email header forging goes on. Who sent you the virus and who is listed as sender can be two different people.
A worm is completely self-propagating. It runs on its own. A worm spreads over networks by attacking ports on other computers, looking for vulnerable programs. Once found, it sends itself to the other computer, and then the new copy starts running and propagating.
Note that some infectors are a mix of the above.
- The Internet was swamped last Sat. by a very large worm event.
- All news articles in standard media I read called it a “virus”.
ergo - Never, ever trust what standard media says about tech. They are completely and utterly clueless.