If you are involved in computers like I
was, growing up in the '90s, in the early 2000s,
you no doubt have heard about the terms of viruses, worms,
Trojans, and malware.
And in this Nugget, we're going to be talking a little bit more
about what those things are, what they do,
and what risks they pose.
Let's get going talking about malware.
Viruses, worms, Trojans, malware,
that's what we're talking about in this video.
They all feel like they fall into the same category.
And in many ways they do. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
And in many ways they do.
But there are some things that differentiate them
from other applications or from each other.
And that's what we got to talk about in this Nugget.
So let's start off by talking about a virus.
What is a virus?
How does it behave and what does it do?
A virus is an application that has to be run in order
to take effect.
It's no different from how you have
to run an application to type a document up,
except for in this case, the virus is
a self-contained application.
Maybe you think it's supposed to do one thing, WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
Maybe you think it's supposed to do one thing,
but in reality it's doing something else.
So when you run a nuclear virus.exe as administrator,
what is it really doing under the hood?
Well, there's a bunch of different things
that it could be doing.
Basically, if you can imagine it, that's what a virus can do.
In lots of ways, a virus can do things
like attack the master boot record.
That way, on your hard drive, the next time
you try to boot the device up it simply won't boot up.
It's not capable of doing it.
The device is effectively hosed the moment WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
The device is effectively hosed the moment
you turn it off because it will never come back online again.
Sometimes the virus may want to access
some of your peripherals, like a printer, or a webcam,
or a microphone.
In a way, sometimes a virus may want to actually access
your keyboard.
What it does is it logs all of your keystrokes.
For instance, they call this a key logger.
Maybe the virus is designed to detect
a certain string of characters, maybe something
like your bank.com website.
The moment it detects that you're going to bank.com it's WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
The moment it detects that you're going to bank.com it's
starting to log all of your keystrokes looking for what
may be a username and password.
Or maybe it's scanning through your entire file system,
looking for important pictures or documents, or things
like that.
The point is, once the virus has the info it's looking for,
the next thing it does is it exfiltrates that data
back to the viruses creator.
Another key thing about a virus is
that it can replicate itself, much
like an actual virus in nature.
And it may attempt to spread through other channels or means WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
And it may attempt to spread through other channels or means
of communication, like email.
So once it's infected you and it's performed its tasks,
it will then try and infect the next person
and spread naturally around the world.
This is very similar to a worm.
A worm does many of these things already,
but it doesn't require an end user to launch an application.
It's just working on its own naturally.
It routes through your file system, and your operating
system, and your registry and still
attempts to replicate and produce itself,
spreading throughout the world in natural ways. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
spreading throughout the world in natural ways.
Now the Trojan horse attack, or malware,
is one of the more common ones that you see.
Because in this case, what a Trojan horse really is, is it's
presenting itself as one application, an application
that you may find desirable, or something that you want,
when really under the hood, it's executing
this virus-like or malware-like code.
So much like the ancient Greek story
of how the Trojan horse was used to infiltrate a base, and then
everybody jumped out at nighttime.
And then they took over the city and the base, and everything WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
And then they took over the city and the base, and everything
like that.
That's what this is doing here.
You may think that you're downloading
a legitimate antivirus program when in reality, it's
doing the exact opposite.
You download it, you install it, and you run it.
And then under the hood, it performed
all of these actions working against you.
And what's the real threat here?
Where do these viruses really originate from,
and all this malware really originate from?
Again, it falls back to people and people's willingness
to help or people's willingness to click on links that they
shouldn't.
And maybe they do that at home. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
And maybe they do that at home.
But chances are, if they do that at home, they're
also going to do it on their work computer too.
And once they do it on the work computer,
hackers and attackers have now gained access
to your corporate systems.
So rather than looking at people's
individual personal documents or their photos, now
they've got access to their file share.
Luckily for us, antiviruses and malware solutions
have gotten a lot better and faster over time,
especially after the late '90s and early 2000s, where
peer-to-peer file sharing really caused
these attacks to be prolific. WEBVTT X-TIMESTAMP-MAP=LOCAL:00:00:00.000,MPEGTS:900000
these attacks to be prolific.
With off the shelf antivirus solutions, Windows Defender
or even Cisco's AMP product, which is Advanced Malware
Protection, our systems are much quicker
now to evolve to new and emerging threats.
And these definitions are sent down
automatically to all the devices that
are running these softwares.
So that's been introducing what viruses, worms, Trojans,
and malware can really do to our system.
I hope this has been informative for you.
And I'd like to thank you for viewing.