Computer viruses and super-villains have more in common than you thought. An analogy between the two seemingly-disconnected entities proves why.
Cyber bugs have come a long way since their inception in a quaint little town near Lahore, Pakistan. They’ve brought down businesses, crippled grids, and compromised military secrets.
Here’s an attempt to draw a parallel between the most feared cyber bugs and the most notorious fictional baddies revealed the similarities between the two.
Adware/Malware: These mostly crop up from a little corner of your screen with eye-catching images or texts to lure you into clicking them. The instant you do, you open up your computer to a host of nasty bugs on the dark side of the net.
Viruses needn’t always be bad. There are a whole lot of examples like the ‘File Compressor’ virus – one of the oldest known “good” viruses; the ‘Disk Encrypt or’ – which writes a boot sector virus, encrypting the disks it infects with a strong encryption algorithm ; and the ‘Maintenance Virus’ – which consists of a self-contained program, spawning copies of itself across the different machines in a network.
Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) is a perfect example to demonstrate how organized cyber criminals have become. Instead of spreading the ransomware directly, RaaS enables bad guys all over the world to infect users in their demographic and ask for money.
Many digitally-signed malware makes RaaS files difficult to get detected by a traditional security vendor. Moreover, recovering the system will not remove infection as the bug tampers recovery settings.
A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is essentially a malicious attempt to make a server or a network resource unavailable to users. Its USP is the ability to target a wide variety of important resources, from banks to news websites, and present a massive challenge to people trying to access the net. The difficulty in detecting a DDoS and eliminating it makes it a force to reckon with.
Malware is one wily deceptive virus that can wreak havoc on your system. It packs viruses, worms, trojan horses, scareware, and a whole lot of other malicious programs in its arsenal. In July 2012, a malware worm targeting Iranian nuclear facilities infected PCs at night, blasting AC/DC’s classic hit “Thunderstruck.” What makes it all the more dangerous is the fact that it can be real hard to detect and isolate.
Spyware is software that gathers information about a person or organization without their knowledge. It may then share this information with other vendors or websites. Its modus operandi ranges from tracking cookies and remembering surfed websites to keystrokes.
