If we believe what is observed through the media, particularly the print and interactive media ie emails and online newsletters, there are an awful lot of viruses going around that invade the computer systems through the Internet connection.
But, what the grapevine doesn't have is that many of these 'viruses' are not viruses at all. The question arises, what computer viruses really are? The main reason the media always are in alarm over viruses is that they tend to call any malicious computer programme a virus.
In reality, there are at-least eleven distinct types of malicious software or malware, commonly affecting computers today. The most common of these are worms, Trojans, and spyware. Besides these malicious elements that create problems and crashes the networking system, the incompetence of the system administrators and IT management staff can not be ruled out. Such instances may frequently be witnessed in the cosmopolitan city of a third world country like Pakistan.
Whenever, the system collapses for whatever reason the IT people at the first instinct announce an unidentified virus attack that invaded the system from 'God knows where'.
While, in the second phase the blame is diverted towards the non-IT staff operating in the organisation, who checked their e-mails and created document or text files on the intra-net. Keeping songs on the PCs is also claimed to be the reason for generating viruses, although keeping songs in office PCs is undesirable but this does not spread viruses for sure.
Anyway, lets keep the competence or non-competence of the privileged staff apart.
So, what's the difference between computer viruses and the other types of malware? The difference is that computer viruses are just about the only ones that regularly shut down computers and cause other obvious damage. The most common of the other kinds of malware-worms, Trojans, and spyware are usually only detectable with a special scan.
If the other types of malware are so unobtrusive that they can only be detected with a special scan, then what's to worry about? For starters, these programmes are called malicious for a reason, as they are designed to cause some kind of damage, if not to the user's computer, then to someone else's.
Worms are mostly used to damage, destroy, or disrupt other computer networks than the one on which the host computer is located.
For instance, worms have been used by website owners to shut down rival websites by sending overwhelming numbers of requests to the computer that hosts that website. Worms have also been used to send viruses to other computers, often without infecting the host machine, after all, what the benefit if the worm shuts down its host computer?
Trojans, in turn, are often used to insert worms and other malware on others' computer, even if the Trojan itself does no damage.
But even if you don't care what happens to anyone else, you should still be concerned about one kind of malware: spyware, a kind of malware that collects data from the infected computer and sends it back to a remote host. Most spyware are only interested in monitoring the Internet usage so it can tell other programmes, called adware, what advertising to popup on your computer. However, there are criminal spyware programmes that steal financial data, or perform a thorough identity theft. Some spyware programmes contain a key-logger, which is a programme that copies whatever you type, usually in order to snatch passwords.
Even if one keeps no financial information on the computer, if one ever buys anything over the web, the key-logger would allow its owner to buy stuff using the same information the user typed in to buy stuff.
A common myth has been created that goes something like this: "The only malicious software is a virus. Viruses damage your computer. Therefore, if my computer is working OK, my computer has no malicious software. I only need to scan my computer for problems when there is a sign of problem."
Thanks to this myth, many people complacently let their anti-virus software go months out of date, not wanting to be bothered with scheduling an automatic update. Just as bad, many people don't have any extra software to combat the other types of malware that may not be covered by anti-virus software.
Until the biggest mainstream media, especially television start educating public about the need to have their computers automatically scanned at least daily, the world will continue to have major drawn-out problems with malware that could have been wiped out as soon as the anti-malware software makers discovered it.
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