Does
Your PC Have Worms?
by: Joel Walsh
Worms aren't just for dogs anymore. Find out how to inoculate
your computer against these nasty parasites.
What Are Worms?
Worms are descended from viruses and are even nastier. Just as
ever stronger doses of pesticide breed ever more resilient
locusts, better and better anti-spyware software bred ever more
devious viruses.
Finally, some virus designers stopped having their creations
infect and take over files the way real viruses infect and take
over cells. Instead, they created programs that could stand on
their own and cause plenty of trouble without the help of any
other software applications. Just worms are independent
organisms that can infect a host directly, so do computer worms
infect computers directly.
What Do Worms Do?
Worm designers are often even more sinister than virus
designers, since worm designers are not just vandals. Worm
designers often use their creations to achieve specific goals:
• Backdoor creation. Worms often try to set up another kind of
malware, a backdoor. A backdoor is a hidden opening in your
network connection that lets the worm send data out and take
data in. Practically speaking, the data it's sending out are
often spam emails, and the data it takes in are instructions on
spam emails to send.
• Denial of service attack. Some worm designers really are
vandals rather than profit-hungry con artists sending spam. But
their vandalism can be more targeted. They use worms to send out
numerous requests to remote computers, such as web servers, in
order to overwhelm them and therefore shut them down. This is
called a denial of service attack.
• Spyware, Trojan, adware, and virus installation. Worms are
often used simply to unleash other forms of malware on a
computer that might otherwise block them.
• Information theft and fraud.Worms can multitask in order to
set up spyware that gathers sensitive information--often
financial information--and then set up backdoors, Trojans,
viruses, or dialers to disseminate the stolen data.
How Do Worms End Up on a PC?
Worms enter PCs just as viruses, spyware and other malware do:
any way they can! Some favorite points of entry for worms:
• Websites can actually download software to your computer
without you realizing it. This software includes not only worms,
but also spyware, adware, viruses, and other malware. These
malware programs find their way into websites either by the
deliberate design of the site owner or because hackers have
installed the software on the website's server.
• Peer-to-peer file-sharing networkscontain many
nice-enough-looking files that are really worms. One of the
sneakiest disguises is a filename that indicates the spyware is
really a video of a beautiful actress.
• Email, the favored route of viruses, can still be exploited by
Spyware. But since new email programs usually block the
automatic opening of file attachments, this is less of a problem
than it used to be.
• Any internet connection inevitably lets data flow both in and
out, and so is vulnerable to attacks by worms.
How Do You Get Rid of Worms?
There's really only one good way to make sure your computer is
rid of worms: scan it with multiple antivirus and anti-spyware
programs using a full-system scan. Worms are tricky, so anything
less than a full-system scan might let them escape. Worse, with
new worms coming out all the time, some antivirus and anti-spyware
packages may not even know about a new worm until after its
wreaking havoc on your machine. That's why you should try using
more than one antivirus program and more than one anti-spyware
program to increase your odds of successfully detecting the
malware.
Don't have more than one anti-spyware and antivirus software?
You'd better start downloading. After all, worms won't take
excuses.
About the author:
Joel Walsh writes for
http://www.spyware-refuge.com/ about
worm removal
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