Video Transcript
Hi! Brad again from Idealogical. Today, I’m three people. Myself, Darren he’s a fancy guy and Sean even fancier. Check out his hat.
If you’ve used a computer in the last of few years, you’ve probably heard the term virus being thrown around and it’s a vague term for lots of different types of viruses. But what is a computer virus? It’s important to know what virus you’re dealing with. So we’re here to tell you what they are, where they originate and how you identify them.
But why call them viruses? Much like a virus in a person, a computer virus does exactly the same thing, it will infect, slow down or can even kill the computer. The most common types of virus is the Trojan Virus named after the famous horse that invaded Troy. It was a hollowed out horse use to smuggle the soldiers inside of the horse into Troy. Just like that story, the chosen virus needs to be accepted by you on your computer by a download. Once you download the file to your computer, the file is now on your computer and will begin to infect the files and folders living on your computer.
A worm is like a parasite, like a parasite a worm will infect your system. In this case it is a computer system not a human body. Once a worm runs on your computer, it will completely spread through your network slowing your connection down. It will also upload any information to its author.
Spyware gets its name from how it operates. It gets onto your system in the background and most times you don’t even know it’s there making illegitimate changes. Same way a spy would look for you, the spyware’s collecting information about the activity of your computer. The ware part is wearing down your system. This makes it slower because it’s collecting a lot of information. Spyware is not there to destroy your system it’s just there to change things that you do on a daily day such as ads that you receive and search engine results that you get all the time.
A Rootkit virus will root itself onto your computer’s hard drive and stay hidden while it gains access to the files and folders on your computer. That’s not good because the first thing it’ll try to do is to attempt to learn passwords, credit card information , your log ins, and info about the computer’s resources and it will hide itself from your computer’s antivirus applications. The only way to counter the rootkit is to reformat your hard drive.
Adware gets its name because it’s delivered by ads on websites. Adware runs on your computer usually in a form of pop ups in the hopes that you might click on it. Once you click the ad the author can make some money from the website traffic to the site that the ad leads to.
Malware is short for malicious software. It’s a vague term but malware is usually in the form of a Trojan or a worm and includes spyware. It disguises itself as the legitimate program you would normally install. The catch is, malware will steal your passwords, redirect web traffic and do things that are unintentional to your system with the intent of stealing your data.
And those are the most common types of viruses known to us. If you ever encounter any of these viruses please give us a call right away. That’s why we’re here.