Computer Viruses

18 Pages 4400 Words

of people. An attack on a computer's vulnerabilities are really an attack on peoples' vulnerabilities.
Today, computer systems are under attack from a multitude of sources. These range from malicious code, such as viruses and worms, to human threats, such as hackers and phone "phreaks." These attacks target different characteristics of a system. This leads to the possibility that a particular system is more susceptible to certain kinds of attacks.
Malicious code, such as viruses and worms, attack a system in one of two ways, either internally or externally. Traditionally, the virus has been an internal threat (an attack from within the company), while the worm, to a large extent, has been a threat from an external source (a person attacking from the outside via modem or connecting network).
Human threats are perpetrated by individuals or groups of individuals that attempt to penetrate systems through computer networks, public switched telephone networks or other sources. These attacks generally target known security vulnerabilities of systems. Many of these vulnerabilities are simply due to configuration errors.
Malicious Code
Viruses and worms are related classes of malicious code; as a result they are often confused. Both share the primary objective of replication. However, they are distinctly different with respect to the techniques they use and their host system requirements. This distinction is due to the disjoint sets of host systems they attack. Viruses have been almost exclusively restricted to personal computers, while worms have attacked only multi-user systems.
A careful examination of the histories of viruses and worms can highlight the differences and similarities between these classes of malicious code. The characteristics shown by these histories can be used to explain the differences between the environments in which they are found. Viruses and worms have very different functional requirements; currently no cl...