Exercise 07

Types of Computer Viruses

Worm In computer labs to test To spread, these worms

W orms were one of

the first computer
viruses. A program
if a program can be
made to replicate itself.
stay resident in the
computer’s memory and
keep a watch on disk
Written as worm virus Most of the current access activities.
normally do not do any viruses contain a worm Whenever a new disk is
destructive work, a program in them to put in the drive and a
worm’s main work is to manage the replication disk access command
replicate itself, i.e. to part of the virus. such as DIR is given,
keep-on copying itself to these programs
any new disk used in the A pure worm program immediately copy
system, or in the does not do any themselves to some
network copying to new destructive work, but it .EXE, .COM etc.
systems, and keep reduces the available executable program on
spreading. space of the storage the new disk.

The original work

programs were made as
experimental programs
TC
device by replicating
itself and filling the
available memory space.
taken from:
Modern all about
Hard Disk Drive.

Later when this These viruses also spread by copying themselves to

infected disk is taken the boot sector of the floppy, after this when the
on some other machine infected floppy is used to boot on some machine these
C
and the infected virus become active.
program is executed,
the virus becomes If the machine, where the virus becomes active
active in the new contains a hard disk drive, then the virus also copies
computer’s memory, itself to the hard disk drive be writing itself to the
K

again waiting for some MBR (Master Boot Record), DBR (Dos Boot Record)
disk to copy itself. or the executable programs on the hard disk drive.

Trojan
Trojan is a name given to those programs that appear
as some useful utility, but they contain some hidden
destructive parts.
For example, a demo program that plays some music,
also may delete some useful file or format the whole
drive, while you are listening to the music, can be
called a Trojan.
A virus that has infected a useful .COM or .EXE
program makes that executable program a Trojan
because the moment someone executes them, the
virus will become active.