Guide On Malware

[Minus-Zero]

Malware Guide

I originally had it here; http://www.guruforums.net/showthread.php?tid=376

Hello, it's Minus-Zero! In this guide it will explain to you what malware is.
This is a quick and short guide on teaching you some basic "need to know info".
So if you don't mind let's get started!

*Quote from wikipedia*

Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner's informed consent. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.

Basically Malware is just something that will execute malicious code on your computer. Now you know what it is lets show you some examples!

Types of Malware

Trojan Horses

A Trojan horse is not considered a computer virus or worm because it does not propagate itself. However, a virus or worm may be used to copy a Trojan horse on to a target system as part of the attack payload, a process referred to as dropping. The typical intent of a Trojan horse is to disrupt the user’s work or the normal operations of the system. For example, the Trojan horse may provide a backdoor into the system for a hacker to steal data or change configuration settings.

Some Trojan Horses are:

- Remote Access Tool (RAT)
A RAT is a Trojan Horse that allows a user to execute commands via a client. The attacker must upload the server
to the victims PC. Then the attacker may use a client to execute the commands. Some examples of RAT's you may know are
Cybergate, Cerberus or SubSeven. There are many others but those are just a few!

- Rootkits
These are collections of software programs that a hacker can use to gain unauthorized remote access to a computer and launch
additional attacks.. These programs may use a number of different techniques, including monitoring keystrokes, changing system
log files or existing system applications, creating a backdoor into the system, and starting attacks against other computers on
the network.

Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself[1] and infect a computer. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, adware, and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability. A true virus can only spread from one computer to another (in some form of executable code) when its host is taken to the target computer; for instance because a user sent it over a network or the Internet, or carried it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB drive. Viruses can increase their chances of spreading to other computers by infecting files on a network file system or a file system that is accessed by another computer.

- A virus is basically those nasty little things you get from downloading infected programs. These can do a variety of things, from
moving a folder somewhere without your consent to deleting System32 folder. They also can do much much more then that. But most
common viruses do one of those things.

Worms

A computer worm is a self-replicating Malware computer program. It uses a computer network to send copies of itself to other nodes (computers on the network) and it may do so without any user intervention. This is due to security shortcomings on the target computer. Unlike a virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.

- Well other then that definition I provided I don't know what else to tell you. I might as well as give you an example of a worm.
One good example and recent one would be "The Conflicker Worm". It was a self-replicating piece of Malware which was very
effective. It infected numerous computers around the world. It just kept infecting computer after computer. If you do a bit more
research on that worm you may understand worms more.


Well, that is all for now... I feel like making a tutorial on something else... I wanted to make this at the beginning then 5 seconds into it, I lost motivation. I apologize for that!