Malware Removal
Malware
Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer system without the owner's informed consent. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code. The term "computer virus" is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to include all types of malware, including true viruses.
The best-known types of malware, viruses and worms, are known for the manner in which they spread, rather than any other particular behavior. The term computer virus is used for a program that has infected some executable software and that causes that when run, spread the virus to other executables. Viruses may also contain a payload that performs other actions, often malicious. A worm, on the other hand, is a program that actively transmits itself over a network to infect other computers. It too may carry a payload.
Virus
A virus is a small piece of software that piggybacks on real programs. For example, a virus might attach itself to a program such as a spreadsheet program. Each time the spreadsheet program runs, the virus runs, too, and it has the chance to reproduce (by attaching to other programs) or wreak havoc.
E-mail viruses - An e-mail virus travels as an attachment to e-mail messages, and usually replicates itself by automatically mailing itself to dozens of people in the victim's e-mail address book. Some e-mail viruses don't even require a double-click -- they launch when you view the infected message in the preview pane of your e-mail software.
Worm
A worm is a small piece of software that uses computer networks and security holes to replicate itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has a specific security hole. It copies itself to the new machine using the security hole, and then starts replicating from there, as well.
Trojan
A Trojan horse is simply a computer program. The program claims to do one thing (it may claim to be a game) but instead does damage when you run it (it may erase your hard disk). Trojan horses have no way to replicate automatically.
"It is a harmful piece of software that looks legitimate. Users are typically tricked into loading and executing it on their systems", as Cisco describes. The term is derived from the Trojan Horse story in Greek mythology.
A Trojan horse may modify the user's computer to display advertisements in undesirable places, such as the desktop or in uncontrollable pop-ups, or it may be less notorious, such as installing a toolbar on to the user's Web browser without prior mentioning. This can create the author of the Trojan revenue, despite it being against the Terms of Service of most major Internet advertising networks, such as Google AdSense.
Trojan horses may allow a hacker remote access to a target computer system. Once a Trojan horse has been installed on a target computer system, a hacker may have access to the computer remotely and perform various operations, limited by user privileges on the target computer system and the design of the Trojan horse.
Spyware
Spyware is a type of malware that can be installed on computers and collects little bits of information at a time about users without their knowledge. The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user, and can be difficult to detect. Typically, spyware is secretly installed on the user's personal computer. Sometimes, however, spywares such as keyloggers are installed by the owner of a shared, corporate, or public computer on purpose in order to secretly monitor other users.
While the term spyware suggests that software that secretly monitors the user's computing, the functions of spyware extend well beyond simple monitoring. Spyware programs can collect various types of personal information, such as Internet surfing habits and sites that have been visited, but can also interfere with user control of the computer in other ways, such as installing additional software and redirecting Web browser activity. Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs. In an attempt to increase the understanding of spyware, a more formal classification of its included software types is captured under the term privacy-invasive software.
Rootkit
A rootkit is a software or hardware device designed to gain administrator-level control over a computer system without being detected. Although rootkits can serve a variety of ends, they have gained notoriety as malware, appropriating computing resources without the knowledge of the administrators or users of affected systems. Rootkits can target the BIOS, hypervisor, boot loader, kernel or less commonly, libraries or applications.
A rootkit may also install a "back door" within host systems by, for example, replacing the login mechanism (such as the /bin/login program on Unix-like systems.) The replacement acts similarly, but accepts another login combination that allows an attacker direct access with administrative privileges to a system bypassing standard authentication and authorization mechanisms.
Once installed, a rootkit usually takes active measures to obscure its presence within the host system through subversion or evasion of standard operating system security tools and API's used for diagnosis, scanning and monitoring. Rootkits achieve this by modifying the behavior of core parts of an operating system through the installation or modification of drivers or kernel modules. Obfuscation techniques include concealing running processes from system monitoring mechanisms and hiding system files and other configuration data. It is not uncommon for a rootkit to erase the event logging capacity of an operating system in an attempt to hide evidence of an attack. Rootkits that crash the system, slow it down or introduce erratic behavior are defective in that these changes are visible enough to get the attention of the system's users and lead to discovery. The "perfect rootkit" can be thought of as similar to a "perfect crime", one that nobody realizes has taken place.
Source:Wikepedia
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