Characteristics and Operations of Malware

Characteristics and Operations of Malware

Characteristics of Malware

The malwares in existence have many different characteristics. One characteristic of malware is that they are mandatory to install. They do not require an administrator’s permission for them to install. They install themselves on the user’s computer. The malwares are difficult to uninstall. The malwares do not have the conventional way of uninstallation, and they always run even after unloading procedures. The malwares also hijack browsers. The malwares do this, and they modify the user’s information.

Malwares also collect the user’s information. The information ranges from the user’s internet use behavior to private information like bank details and passwords. The malware also conducts malicious uninstallation of programs. Malware like computer viruses can replicate themselves until they infect the whole system. They also can attach themselves to computer files. Malware also reduces the speeds of the computer system and its related processes like data transfer. Some malwares are polymorphic, meaning they can change the computer’s code.

Operations of Malware

The different malwares operate in many different ways as well. Computer viruses infect clean files in a computer system and replicate within the system. The viruses corrupt the computer system and usually delete other files and programs. Viruses cause extensive damages to a computer system (Cohen, 1987). Adware is generally not aggressive or malicious, but the advertising software can undermine the security of the computer system. By undermining the security protocols of the computer, the adware can enable other malware to attack a user’s computer.

Worms can infect entire networks, and they use one computer on the network to infect the next one consecutively. Spyware is malware specifically engineered to spy on the user of a computer. It gathers information like passwords, private information, internet use habits, and many more. Ransomware works by denying user access to critical or private information on the computer until the user pays ransom usually in the form of money. Trojans are malwares that disguise themselves as genuine software, and they discretely run in the background, creating a back door in a user’s system that acts as an entry point for other malwares (Rahbarinia et al., 2017).

Reference

Cohen, F. (1987). Computer viruses: theory and experiments. Computers & security, 6(1), 22-35.

Rahbarinia, B., Balduzzi, M., & Perdisci, R. (2017, June). Exploring the long tail of (malicious) software downloads. In 2017 47th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) (pp. 391-402). IEEE.