Computer worms are made to infect other computers through using the Internet to spam copies of themselves to spread. Most computer worms are damaging through their negative impact of system and network resources through their rapid and mostly uncontrolled spread. Some worms are coupled or combined with other computer malware in order to maximize their impact.
Methods of Computer Worm Infection
A lot of computer worms are made with the sole intention to spread and not cause harm to networks and users computers. Examples of worms with benign intentions such as this that resulted in unintended network disruptions were the Morris Worm and Mydoom. Other worms will carry a payload meant to do harm. The ExploreZip worm will actually delete files on the targeted computer. Some worms will encrypt files in an attempt to extort the user to remove the encryption, and others will install a backdoor on your computer in order to allow it to be used to attack other computers, websites, or computing systems. Many times email spammers are found to be behind computer worm infections that are coupled with a payload to make a user’s computer open to being taken over for sending spam email. Other means of spreading by worms are making use of backdoors opened by other computer malware. The well-known worm, Doomjuice uses the backdoor that is opened on your computer by Mydoom. Other means of spreading are through infected email attachments and multi-media files.
Current Trends of Computer Worms
Robert Tappan Morris is credited with accidentally creating the first computer worm in 1988. The “Internet Worm” as it was known, used the sendmail function, finger, and rsh/rexec to spread itself to other computers on the Internet. The SQL Slammer Worm came out in 2003 and used a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 vulnerability in order to spread across the Internet. The Blaster Worm took a similar route in the 2003 by using a Microsoft DCOM / RPC to spread. Well-known email worms that have emerged over the past decade have been: 1 – The Melissa worm of 1999, 2 – The Sobig WOrm of 2003, and 3 – Mydoom worm in 2004. These worms shared features with a Trojan Horse in that they encouraged the end-user to open the infected file attachment in order to spread. The MyDoom worm, however, was the first of a number of computer malware programs to use peer-to-peer file sharing networks to rapidly spread. MyDoom was originally spread using the KaZaa file sharing network and had variants which used payloads to launch denial of service attacks againstMicrosoft and SCO.
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