Article on Viruses Computer viruses are an unfortunate everyday occurrence, due to their high prevalence and ability to do a number of things. They can range from simple packet sniffing to data mining to keylogging. In my article I will talk about computer viruses, how they are built, the different types of viruses, how they work and the measures that can be taken to prevent them. I believe that computer viruses are an extremely dangerous part of the Internet of Things and everyone should be very cautious when it comes to how they use the Internet and how they act online. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay A computer virus, as stated by Xiaofan Yang and Lu-Xing Yang in their article titled “Towards Epidemiological Modeling of Computer Viruses” is, “a malicious program that can replicate and spread from one computer to another.. . virus can perform devastating operations such as modifying data, deleting data, deleting files, encrypting files, and formatting disks" (Yang). This is important because the crucial thing about viruses is that they are almost always intended to cause harm. The authors believe that as technology improves, concern about computer viruses grows exponentially, and current antivirus technology cannot predict how computer viruses will evolve in the coming years. There are many different types of viruses and what they can do. The most common is the Trojan horse. It hides in applications and files that you normally associate with safe files and inserts itself into your computer once you open the file or run the program. There are different types of attacks even when it comes to networks rather than individual user PCs. For example, a "spoofing" is a type of attack in which the corrupted node does not present itself correctly in the network, so that the sender's topology changes. The most popular type of attack that viruses can use are botnets. A botnet is a collection of computers that have been hacked and can all be used at a hacker's whim. For example, a hacker can use a botnet to perform a DOS attack or a denial of services attack. This essentially shuts down any website the hacker wants, as the botnet consumes all of the site's bandwidth and forces the website to display error messages as it cannot handle the amount of traffic funneled through the server. examples of viruses used to cause chaos. In the article written by Lauren Sporck titled “The Most Destructive Malware of All Time” she talks about the largest malware attacks ever. For example, in 2004, the fastest-spreading virus in history emerged. It's called "My Doom Worm." Typically, as the authors state, “they were transmitted via email and usually contained a variety of subject lines including “Error,” “Mail Delivery System,” “Test,” or “Mail Transaction Failed.” (Sporck.) This is interesting because the creator of the virus played with people opening almost all emails received without warning and, in this case, took advantage of the fact that people were curious whether, for example, the email they had sent was unsuccessful and I wanted to know what the error was. “Superfish Adware” is another case of virus that is gaining traction fame through a class action lawsuit filed against Lenovo, the world's largest PC manufacturer. Superfish spyware was pre-installed on Lenovo computers without Lenovo customers being informedof its existence. Superfish installed its own root certificate authority which allowed it to nullify SSL/TLS connections, creating an opening or “hole” for attackers. This exposed Lenovo users to potential cybercriminals, while providing Superfish and Lenovo with a way to target unsuspecting users with personalized advertisements” (Sporck). This is very interesting because it reveals multiple sides of the story. On the one hand there is the hole left open and vulnerable for hackers that could be easily manipulated, and on the other hand there is the use of tailored advertising which many disapprove of. A third real-world virus is the “Code Red Worm.” This worm affected nearly 360,000 computers by targeting computers running a specific Microsoft web server and only that web server. This is interesting because the hackers chose to do this because it was most likely the most commonly used web server at the time, and using a little black hat magic they were able to inject their code into the server and send it to every computer that was running the server. The worm managed to do this by exploiting a security vulnerability known as buffer overflow. Another real-world example of a computer virus is the "SoBig.F Worm", a malware that was injected via email, then looked in the email directory of the infected computer and sent the malware email to all contacts, spreading the virus even faster. Ultimately, the worm caused about $37 billion in damage and brought down freight and computer traffic in Washington. A final example of a real-world virus is the “CIH Virus”. It is named after the Chernobyl disaster and was due to open on the anniversary of the disaster. The virus, as stated in the article, “The virus worked by erasing data from the hard drives of infected devices and overwriting the BIOS chip inside the computer, rendering the device unusable. This virus caused enormous damage because the BIOS chip was not removable on many PCs, requiring the user to replace the entire motherboard” (Sporck) This is a particularly nasty virus because it renders a person's PC essentially unusable and, therefore, they have to buy a whole new computer and hope it doesn't. getting caught by the same virus again or potentially getting a new one Overall, there are many different types of viruses and they can do many different things, what we as people need to do is focus on how to stop viruses from advancing and what we can do. to better protect ourselves online and offline. There are many ways to protect yourself from computer viruses. The simplest way is to download antivirus software that regularly scans your hard drives and computer system and checks for viruses. If it finds one, it usually quarantines it until you give a directive about what you want the antivirus software to do. Sometimes programs detect "false positives," programs or files that you know are safe but that the antivirus program thinks are a virus for some reason. This is usually because the file that triggers the false positive has some similarities to the files that the antivirus algorithm is looking for. Another way to protect yourself from viruses and avoid malware is to invent a new detection framework. For example, an article written by Sushma Verma and SK Muttoo titled “An Android Malware Detection Framework-based on Permissions and Intents”. This article discusses how Android phones and smartphones in general have recently become a viable source of hacking. In this article the authors discuss how current Android antivirus and antimalware protection works and provide a clear hybrid method for detecting Android malware by analyzing permissions and intent filtersof the applications you want to download to your phone. The authors state that “The increased use of smartphones may be combined with a huge increase in security breaches due to the exploitation of the growing number of vulnerabilities related to Android applications. The continued exponential growth in the use of intelligent mobile technology has necessitated the search for security solutions for mobile devices” (Verma, Muttoo). Further in the article, the authors, when describing how they plan to achieve this new type of malware detection, state: "Our methodology aims to develop a detection system that focuses on feature extraction and selection to measure and characterize applications malicious based on the permissions and intents specified in the application manifest file” (Verma, Muttoo) This is interesting because the authors say that the way they will find the malware is simply by checking the permissions and intents of what the file. or the program wants to change or modify. This is interesting because it is very difficult for a hacker to hide what the program does and this will lead to hackers being even smarter when it comes to bypassing Android security Programmers discover how to stop hackers is to find exploitable holes first and plug them. An article written by Adam Kiezun, Philip Guo, Karthick Jayaraman and Michael Ernst entitled “Automatically Creating SQL Injection and Cross-Site Scripting Attacks” discusses this type of prevention. The paper states that “We present a technique for finding security vulnerabilities in web applications. SQL Injection (SQLI) and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks are popular forms of attacks in which the attacker crafts the application input to access or modify user data and execute malicious code. In more serious attacks, an attacker can corrupt a database in a way that causes subsequent users to execute malicious code” (Kiezun et al.). This is interesting because what the authors say is that they have created a technique that inserts some code into a web application and finds all the security flaws in the website so that they can be fixed and can prevent hackers. Discussing how it works, the authors stated that "our technique works on existing unmodified code, creates concrete inputs that expose vulnerabilities, operates before the software is deployed, has no overhead for released software, and analyzes the internal components of the application to discover vulnerable code... Ardilla is a white-box testing tool, meaning it requires the application's source code. Ardilla is designed to test PHP applications before deployment Security vulnerabilities identified by Ardilla can be resolved before the software reaches users because Ardilla creates concrete attacks that exploit the vulnerability. In our experiments, Ardilla discovered 68 previously unknown vulnerabilities in five applications” (Kiezun et al.). they invented, when shown with a PHP script, the tool found 68 vulnerabilities in five separate applications that were previously unknown. This is important because by using this tool many websites will be much safer when it comes to potentially being hacked and hit by viruses. One final source that shows methods of virus protection and how we are preparing for the new wave of potential viruses that will arise from the overall increase in technology is an article written by Dr. Milind Joshi and Bhaskar Patil titled “Computer Virus and Methods of Virus Detection using parameter.