 |
Lesson 4: Viruses - part 1 | part 2
Black hat: A programmer who uses his skills to damage the internet.
VXer: a criminal who writes viruses - sometimes for fun, sometimes for profit.
Malware: Any program which is designed to harm your computer or its security.
Adware: A program that shows you advertisements (sometimes lots and lots of advertisements) while you are using the net. Many people think a website is showing all the advertisements, when it is the adware infecting their computer.
Ransomware: A type of malicious software which encrypts files on the computer until a sum of money is paid.
Trojan: A program which gets into your computer by hiding itself in another, innocent piece of software.
Worm: Malware which spreads from computer to computer in a network, often without the user doing anything, or even being logged in.
Owned: When a black hat's program is able to give him total control of someone else's machine.
Phoning home: When a virus or spyware had successfully entered a computer, it can signal the VXer that he can start his egg-drop.
Egg-drop: When a trojan has allowed a VXer into a computer, he must then download ('do an egg-drop') onto that computer all the files he needs to use to own it.
Signature: A piece of code that an anti-virus program can use to identify a virus.
Exploit: The method that a particular virus uses to infect a computer.
In the wild: Some computer vilnerabilities are discovered by researchers before they can do any damage. A computer virus that is on worling computers and causing harm is said to be 'in the wild'.
Payload: A virus has three parts - the part that gets it into a computer's operating system, a part that it uses to spread further, and the payload - what it actually does to the computer it has infected.
Spoofing: Email viruses do not want to be traced back to the machine that they came from, so they pretend to be sent from another computer.
Social engineering: Persuading a user to run an infected file. This is sometimes done by emails which pretend to be jokes, pornography or 'important notices'.
Zero Day Virus: When a virus is first detected when it is already 'in the wild' and infecting computers.
