--Originally published at Don't Trust Humans, Trust Computers
I remember when I was a kid entering to these websites were you can play free games. Sometimes I entered to webpages that were legit, but other times I didn’t. And I entered those unlegit websites because I didn’t knew of the harm that those websites could cause. So by now you probably figure out that my computer was FULL of malware, by that time. The concept of malware is not knew in the computer science community, but many people do not know what is malware and the various types of malware it exists in the world. In this post I will talk about some of the most common malware there are and how can we prevent them.
But before I tell you the types of malware, we need to come clean with the term “malware”. Malware is just the combination of the words malicious and software; and it is software made to cause malfunctions in any system, spy or even take data form the system without the owner knowing about it. There is a great range of malware out there, but here I am going to tell you the most common ones.
Adware
How many time have you enter a website and thousands of pop-ups appear in your monitor saying that you are the 1,000 visitor or that you have won a brand new iphone? Well, this pop-ups are known as adware and it is purpose is to show emerging publicity. Most of the time if you click in one of this pop-ups, it will install you automatically a tool bar so you can enter the websites where you will see this pop-ups. Also, sometimes these kind of malware come with somekind of spyware, which I will discuss later.
Virus
Just as you get sick because a virus or
Bots
This is software that is made to perform specific tasks. Bots aren’t completely malicious, there are some unharmful bots that actually entertain us or help us. But also in the other hand we have this malicious bots that only wants to harm systems. With this bots, people have used them to create botnets, which are networks that connect computers that have been infected with a malicious bots, and they used them to make DDoS attacks or similar things.
Trojans
Just like the trojan horse, this software does the same. It disguises as a non-corrupted file and when someone downloads it, it secretly installs other type of malware inside the computer. The software a trojan can install can be keylogging, screen watching, create backdoors, etc..
RootKit
This malware is probably one of the most dangerous ones. What it does is basically entering a computer system without anyone noticing and starts making mischiefs, like any other malware. The dangerous part comes when someone detects (which is kind of difficult) and tries to delete it, because this malware affects some of the OS files and if the malware is deleted it may also delete the whole OS.
Where are always going to be vulnerable to any of this type of malware, but there are things that we can make so they can it us. In the next video it explains in a very simple way how to protect ourselves from malware and how to be aware if we have been infested with one.
Stay safe
A.C.
References https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd632948.aspx https://www.veracode.com/blog/2012/10/common-malware-types-cybersecurity-101
