In my previous post I discussed the difficulties our company faces protecting our clients from security threats on the Internet.  To dive into this further I want to discuss the differences between different kinds of security threats.  First off, all security threats were written with bad intentions.  Viruses, malware, adware, rootkits, trojans, etc. were written by a malicious software developer for some personal or corporate gain.  For instance, many of these programs are written to try and get you to divulge personal information (social security numbers, addresses, phones numbers) or financial information (credit card or bank account numbers).  In other instances the software programmer wrote the program to try and cause harm to a corporation.  This has been scene with a common infection that caused websites and personal computers to attack corporate websites like Yahoo.com or Google.com.  The computers were set up as “bots” to send erroneous website requests to these major company’s in the hopes that the servers hosting the websites would be overwhelmed with requests and crash.

The differences in these threats are subtle.  Viruses were developed as the first malicious security threat identified on a personal computer.  Its sole purpose was to spread through a computer network, delete files, corrupt documents or just be a complete annoyance.  One of my favorites was a virus that once activated had an ambulance dance across the screen with a siren howling with a message that you were infected and that all your data would be erased shortly.

Malware and adware are very similar programs in that they infect typically only the computer they are activated on and don’t typically spread to other computers on a network.  Their purpose is typically to try and gain personal or financial information and ship it over the Internet to the develop of the program.  They can also have the effect of just being completely annoying and intrusive causing your PC to be incredibly slow, crash, redirect you to inappropriate websites or just continue to have unwanted pop ups.  Malware is typically not as obvious since its goal is to slow your computer down or download other malware.  Adware is very obvious and will generate pop up adds when browsing the web or install new tray icons on your task bar about fake or out of date antivirus.

Rootkits are probably the most difficult to detect and clean.  A lot of times these programs were written to install and hide themselves from the operating system.  They are not obvious to the user and typically don’t cause any real noticeable changes in your computer.  They are created to allow remote access to your computer from the Internet by the malicious developer to try and gain access to your personal information.  Their other purpose is to stay completely dormant until a point in time the creator initiates them for a specific purpose, such as to attack a corporate website.  There are several of these dormant “bots” in the wild right now with no known purpose.  Scary…

Trojans (Worms) are similar to all of the above, they can act like a virus, malware or rootkit infection.  However, they do try and propagate to other systems both on your network and on the Internet.  In many instances Trojans attack a flaw in a software program or operating system.  The most recent scare was one call the Conficker Worm.  This Trojan spread via a security whole in the Microsoft Windows operating system (Microsoft shortly after released a patch).  If a unpatched system was infected the worm stayed dormant and attempted to spread to other unpatched systems.  Once the code was found by security companies and analyzed it was determined that on a specific date it was going to activate.  However, on the specified date nothing happened.  No one is quite sure why but the code never activated.

In my next post I will discuss a few of the products M3 users to combat these security threats.