16.-+Worms

A worm  is a program that views the infection point as another computer rather than as other executable files on an already infected computer. In simplistic terms this normally means when infected you will only have a single infected program on your computer rather than thousands of the programs you have installed being infected.

A worm is much more sneaky at infecting a computer, but thankfully they are also much easier to identify once infected. The reason they are considered to be more sneaky is because a worm has many more tools at its disposal that it can use to infect you than a virus has. They not only use infected files to lure you, but they take advantage of the fact that programs have bugs that allow them to wiggle into your computer. This means that a worm can infect your computer without you ever having to execute a program infected with a worm, instead they can gain entrance through an open communications port on your computer (which is a virtual port that has no physical self). An important note though is that worms, like viruses, still are required to be executed in order to infect your machine. However, the difference is that worms not only can trick you into infecting yourself, but they can trick your computer into thinking you want to execute them.

Once you are infected with a worm then your computer becomes a zombie that attempts to infect other computers, normally without you ever knowing anything ever happened. Thankfully the majority of worms are written by very poor programmers with little want more than to make a statement to the world. For this reason worms are rarely destructive from a permanent perspective and often are not anywhere as successful as they should be if they were written properly.



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