Malware 101

Symantec.cloud knows the enemy. We work around the clock to identify and stop millions of email, web and IM based threats every day before they can reach our customers. Whether its viruses, phishing attacks, malicious web links, spam, trojans, or spyware, we have a hard-earned reputation of stopping known and unknown threats long before the competition.

We do this by drawing on the scale of our software as a service (SaaS) delivery model and the intelligence drawn from the billions of messages and web pages we process through our network every day. This intelligence is fed in ‘real time’ to our patented Skeptic technology to form the most comprehensive and up to date knowledge base of Internet threats in the world.

Malware

Malware is a catch all term referring to any program of malicious intent that has been written to cause harm to computer systems or to harm the interests of the system owners. First used in 1990, the word is a contraction of ‘mal’ from malicious and ‘ware’ from software and hardware.

Viruses

Viruses are computer programs that can replicate themselves by infecting files. When opened, these files cause the computer to become infected and to start copying the virus to new files. In this way the virus can spread across many different computers and networks through shared files. Worms are a special type of computer virus that can spread over a network connection to infect other computers directly without needing to spread via infected files.

Trojans

Trojan horses are pieces of malware that masquerade as legitimate files but unknown to the user cause harm to the computer on which they are run. Commonly, such programs allow an external attacker access to the affected machine to search for valuable data or to run other malicious software.

Spam

Spam refers to unsolicited emails that often peddle pharmaceutical products. However these messages can attempt to entice the recipient to engage in a fraud or to purchase worthless penny stocks. Spam is very profitable for cyber criminals who create and spread Trojan horse malware to take over computers so that they can send more spam.

Phishing

Phishing is an attempt to trick a user into divulging their username and password to an attacker so that a criminal can impersonate the user and access services on their behalf. Criminals will send out many phishing emails that appear to be from financial organizations, major websites or tax authorities to as many users as possible in the hope that someone will fail to spot the fake message and fall for the con.

Spyware

Spyware are programs that when installed on a computer report back to the owner of the program about the behavior of the user of the computer. Often these programs collect information about the web browsing habits of the user so that targeted advertisements can be shown to the end user.

Malicious links

Malicious links may be included in some spam emails. When clicked, these links direct users to a website that attempts to install malware on the computer. Unsophisticated attacks may require the user to click to install the malicious software. However, many attacks exploit browser vulnerabilities and can install malware without the user’s knowledge.

Targeted Trojans

Targeted Trojans are pieces of malware that have been written to infect a specific individual or group of individuals. In these cases, the attacker carefully researches their intended victims. The attacks often consist of a socially engineered message relevant to victims’ interests to pique their interest, so that they will unknowingly install a Trojan horse to give the attacker access to their computers.