Virus, Worms and Hackers
Computer viruses were first widely seen in the late 1980s. They were caused due to several reasons. The first factor was rapid growth of personal computers. Before this decade personal computers were not seen in many houses. They only computers used were expert computers which were locked in laboratories around the world. During the 1980’s Computers started to sell to several smaller business’s and homes after the release of the IBM PC in 1982 [1]. After its launch, personal computers slowly started spreading to businesses, homes and universities around the world.
The second reason was bulletin boards where users could dial up a bulletin board with a modem and download different programs [2]. The most popular programs were games. Users also downloaded simple word processors and spreadsheets. Bulletin boards led to the precursor of the virus which is know today as the Trojan horse. Trojan horse is a program which can trick the user in to downloading it. This can be done very easily changing the name of the file. When a Trojan program is downloaded on a local computer it can do a lot of harm to it. It can potentially erase all the contents of the hard disk on the computer. Trojan horses hit a small number of people because they are discovered easily. Either the bulletin board would erase the file from the system or the people would send out messages to warn one another. The third reason was growth of floppy disks. Many programs could fit into a single floppy disk. Most computers did have hard disks so computers would just load everything off the floppy when switched on including the operating system.
Computer viruses can be very mysterious and grab our attention. Viruses can show us how vulnerable we are to attacks. A well engineered virus can have a very harmful effect on the internet. An example of this is the worms we have seen in the last few years. MyDoom worm which infected a quarter million computers in a single shook the whole internet community. In March 1999 the Mellisa virus was so powerful, it forced many large companies including Microsoft to completely turn off their email systems until the virus could be contained. The ILOVEYOU worm in 2000 had a similar effect. The most astonishing thing is that these worms were very simple in their implementation. Worms usually exploit some sort of security hole in a piece of software or operating system.
At the Aim Higher College there have been recently discovered malware on the campus systems that are due to many recent attacks. I used an Anti-virus protection software called AVG on the computer systems on campus and ran a whole computer scan. The results came back very quick of numbers of malware being high and medium priorities that these should not be taken lightly. Furthermore, the scan found many viruses, Trojans, and malicious software and applications.
I decided to read the book by David Harley called Viruses Revealed. This book goes into great detail about the different kinds of viruses and virus mechanisms, the solutions to these viruses, studies on different cases of viruses and then the social aspects of viruses. In the first part of the book, Harley talks about the problems with viruses. A virus is a program that infects other programs to modify them. “Infecting means that a virus will insert itself into the chain of command” (Harley). The virus structure was defined into three different parts: Infection, Payload, and Trigger. The infection is defined as the way or ways in which the virus spreads. The payload is defined as what the virus does besides duplicating itself. Trigger is defined as the procedure that decides whether or not the payload is necessary. Harley also talks about the difference between damage versus infection. The major difference between the two is that many users have infected documents or applications on their computer. Whether or not those applications are run is the difference between the two. In part one Harley also converses about Trojan Horses. Trojan horses are normally known as a virus, but he shoots that down. Harley says that Trojan Horses are normally not viruses, but just a worm that goes from computer to computer. After talking about different kinds of viruses and worms, he goes into Anti-Virus softwares. There are two different kinds of anti-viruses. One being virus-specific. Virus-specific means that every time a virus is found on your computer, it is identified but not detected. Generic scanners do the opposite. Generic scanners detect viruses but do not identify them.
If ionizing radiation passes through a cell in the body, it can lead to mutations (changes) in the cell’s DNA, the part of the cell that contains its genes (blueprints). Sometimes this causes the cell to die, but sometimes it can lead to cancer later on. The amount of damage caused in the cell is related to the dose of radiation it receives. The damage takes place in only a fraction of a second, but other changes such as the beginning of cancer may take years to
Radiation is the emission of electromagnetic energy that is given off in the form of high speed particles that cause ionization. During ionization radiation hits and knocks electrons from an atom creating charged ions. Due to the electron being stripped away from the atom this break the chemical bond. Living tissue within the human body is damaged and attempts to repair it but sometimes the damage is beyond repair.
What is Radiation? Radiation is a A form of energy carried by waves or a stream of particles. Radiation is a fragment that is capable of ionizing atoms or molecules isolating electrons from them due to its sufficiently possessed energy when it is passed through them. Radiations include alpha, beta and gamma rays. They can cause severe damage when absorbed by living tissue, and are therefore a health hazard they can effect the repairing ability of living cells. Ionizing radiation consists of subatomic particles or electromagnetic waves that are energetic enough to detach
Gamma radiation therapy kills cancer cells by damaging their individual DNA. Therapy can either damage DNA directly or create charged particles (free radicals) within the cells that can in turn damage the DNA. Damaged cancer cells either stop dividing or die. They are then broken down and eliminated by natural processes inside of the body. However radiation therapy can also damage normal cells. The amount of radiation that normal tissue can safely receive is known for all parts of the body. Doctors use this information to help them decide where to aim radiation during treatment.
DNA damage is a proven biomarker of radiation effects. Cytogenetic techniques commonly employed for detecting DNA strand breakages include chromosome aberrations, micronucleus and comet assay under field and laboratory circumstances. In recent times, flow cytometry (FCM) has been widely used to quantify DNA damage since it offers the analysis of a high number of nuclei in a few minutes providing statistically reliable results in a short period of time. Ideally, all cells within an organism contain the same amount of DNA. DNA damage results from the breakage and rearrangement of chromosomes and from interference with the normal segregation of chromosome during cell division. Double strand breaks are the most important DNA lesions caused by ionizing radiation and other damages from exposure to genotoxic agents resulting in cells with an abnormally high or low DNA content. This variability can be detected as an increased coefficient of variation (CV) of cells in G0/G1 phase as measured by flow cytometry.
Imagine starting up your computer only to see the image on the screen melt while eerie music plays. The hard drive crunches away. What is it doing in there? Before you turn off the machine, most of your files have been deleted. Your computer is the victim of a computer virus. But where did the virus come from? It may have been that game you borrowed or, more likely, it came from an electronic document.
A computer virus is a program designed to replicate and spread, generally with the victim being oblivious to its existence. Computer viruses spread by attaching themselves to other programs such as word processors or spreadsheets, or to the boot sector of the disk. When an infected file is activated, or when the computer is started from an infected disk, the virus itself is also activated. Many times a virus will lurk in a computers memory, waiting to infect the next program or disk that is activated.
ways, perhaps the best thing to do is more a form of damage control rather than
In today’s days malware is designated as a software which aims to disturb a computer with the consent or permission of the owner. This term “Malware” is used by computer professionals to describe a varied forms of destructive, annoying and intrusive software code. This word “Malware” is used to indicate all types of malware which include a true set of viruses.
“A digital world we became”. These days individuals turned to use computer systems in everything in their lives. They even use them in manufacturer instead of employees. I did not say that technological innovation is not essential for us but sometimes the technological innovation disregards our role in life. Technological innovation is very essential to any lifestyle to flourish. Technology contains cell mobile phones, laptops, machines, Ipads and many other factors. Not also they include all the excellent stuff but any great factor comes out with a drawback. Technological innovation has some drawbacks, and the most essential one of them that we will mainly talk about is the malware.
In this globalized arena, with the proliferating computer users as well as computer networks, risks associated like Malware attacks are also multiplying. As the proverb
Malicious code is a real danger to modern systems. Most systems nowadays do not work in isolation; they are more likely to be connected to other systems and sometimes they can even be dependent on them. Therefore an attack on one of the systems in the network is a potential attacking attempt to any other systems, with which it is interacting. Therefore, it is inevitable for any networked or Internet-connected computers to deal with malicious code attacks at some point. Businesses lose billions of dollars each year because of malicious code attacks. Responding to the attack and restoring all the data on the computers is a time-consuming and expensive task. It is a much better practice to try preventing it through organizing and maintaining effective defenses. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is no one general solution that can help to prevent all the attacks. Attackers are constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of systems’ vulnerabilities and find new ones. That’s why organizations have to not only defend themselves against existing attack methods, but also try to predict and prevent new attacking techniques. It means that computer and network security is a never-ending challenge and expense.
The biggest dangers of the Internet are virus. Viruses are small programs that "infect" computers. Most viruses are made to "steal" and or "destroy" data stored on the infected computer. Viruses, that destroy data, write their code into a file and when that file is accessed it rewrites itself in to more files until the virus corrupters or "infects" a file that the computer needs to run properly. This causes a crash to occur. The viruses that "steal" info are small programs that ether look for something in particular or save logs of what the computer does and what keys were hit on the keyboard. These Viruses do not usually causes crashes since they do not corrupt files with the purpose of destroying the file. With such a virus a person may be able to find out passwords and other sensitive information about their target. These viruses can become even more dangerous when the system they are on is an important system like a bank mainframe. There are some viruses that do nothing more then entertain the computer user. This entertainment can be a game that the virus launching or that changes the display of the computer such as the screen shaking, this one is called earthquake, or the picture being turned upside down or even opening your CD-ROM drive, this is called Cokegife. These viruses, thou annoying, do no permanent harm to the systems that they infect, they do their thing and the...