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What is a Trap door, Trojan horse, Worm, and Virus?

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My def:
trap door – Syn. back door — a Bad Thing. a program that allows a 3rd party access to your computer.

from the Symantec website:

Category:Trojan horse
A program that neither replicates or copies itself, but does damage or compromises the security of the computer. Typically it relies on someone emailing it to you, it does not email itself, it may arrive in the form of a joke program or software of some sort.

Category: Virus
A program or code that replicates, that is infects another program, boot sector, partition sector or document that supports macros by inserting itself or attaching itself to that medium. Most viruses just replicate, a lot also do damage.

Category: Worm
A program that makes copies of itself,for example from one disk drive to another, or by copying itself using email or some other transport mechanism. It may do damage and compromise the security of the computer. It may arrive in the form of a joke program or software of some sort.

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The best website to answer these questions is http://www.whatis.com. It is an IT database of words, phrases and acronyms that is kept up to date.

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These are the 4 forms of malicious code, i.e. computer programs (or parts of programs) designed to do something other than the owner of the computer intends.

Trap doors are “back entrances” installed by intruders. They could be extra user accounts, programs such as NetBus, or any number of other things. A trap door is installed by an intruder who has already broken in, to make breaking into that system easier in the future.

A Trojan Horse is malicious code designed to look like something useful. A trojan horse is more of a method of delivery than it is a program, i.e. a trojan horse might contain a virus, worm, and/or install a back door. A trojan horse is designed to trick you into accepting and/or installing it on your system.A lot of e-mail worms that have been going around qualify as trojan horses because they disguise themselves as legitimate traffic.

A worm is malicious code which replicates through network services, e-mail being the most common, so it can infect multiple machines at one time. In other words, a worm will send copies of itself to others using your e-mail account. Most of their damage is done by clogging up the network with useless traffic, though a worm might also be designed to damage your files. The latest crop of worms have been designed to exploit common e-mail software features, and therefore have a “trojan horse” delivery.

A virus is malicious code which replicates throughout one computer system at a time. It embeds itself inall the programs the system is running. When the infected program is run on a different machine, that machine becomes infected as well. They can travel by swapping disks or as e-mail attachments. The difference from worms is that the attachment was sent by the user on purpose, who didn’t know the file was infected. Some just replicate and some do damage.

Good fortune,
Don

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