Malware is malicious software that is designed to cause harm to a system.
A virus is any malicious code that usually attaches itself to a program, file or service.
Viruses are designed infect your system and unleashes its payload.
Viruses requires human interaction to be activated for it to start working and infecting the system.
Within Microsoft Office allows users to create macros on their document files which allows a user to insert additional functionality into the office document.
Macros viruses attaches itself on these office documents and executes when the unaware user opens an infected office file.
The boot sector virus is designed to infect the boot section on the victim's hard disk drive.
If the boot section has this type of virus, when the system boots up, this virus has the potential to compromise all aspects of the victim's systems such as the software and hardware components.
Hackers commonly send phishing emails with attachments.
These attachments may be an infected file that is designed to compromised an unaware user.
A polymorphic virus is designed to constant change its state and coding to evade threat detection systems.
When the virus changes its coding, the function remains the same.
Worms are a type of malware which is self-propagating which means it can spread on its own.
Worms does not require any human interaction, it can function and operate on its own.
Worms are designed to affect the usability of a system by exhausting the computing resources.
This type of virus does not exist as a file and does not have a virus signature.
It is designed to run on memory on a victim' systems.
Traditional antivirus applications may not be able to detect this type of threat on a system.
This is a type of malware which is designed to gain privilege access on a compromised system.
A rootkit is very difficult to detect by anti-malware application since a rootkit sits at the kernel-level of an operating system.
A keylogger is an application that capture all the input of a victim's keyboard.
Hackers use keyloggers to capture sensitive information that is being typed by the victim.
Keyloggers can be either software or hardware-based.
A trojan is a type of malware which is disguised to look like a legitimate program.
A hacker creates a trojan to trick a victim into downloading and executing the malicious file.
When the trojan is executed, the malicious payload is unleashed in the background.
Trojans as usually used to create a backdoor into a victim's system.
A backdoor is usually created on a victim's system by a trojan virus.
The backdoor allows a hacker to gain access to the victim's system using a backdoor approach.
This is a type of malware which remains in a dormant state until some type of action is triggered.
The logic bomb can be triggered based on time, date and user's actions on the system.
This is a type of crypto-malware which is designed to encrypt the data on the hard disk drive.
The ransomware will encrypt all the data on the hard drive except the operating system as it needs a way to presents a payment window for the victim to pay a ransom.
It's never recommended to pay the ransom as there is no reassurance the threat actor will provide the decryption key.
When a hacker compromised a system, a robot (bot) is implanted to ensure the hacker has remote control over the system.
A group of bots, which are infected systems all controlled by the threat actor is known as a robot network or a botnet.
The threat actor does not directly control each individual bot but rather setup a Command and Control (C2) server on the internet which is used to interact with the entire botnet.
This is a type of trojan which allows the threat actor to remotely control the compromised system.
Spyware is a type of malware which is designed to infect, monitor and report the victim's activities back to the threat actor.
This is any unwanted software or application that is installed on your system.
Sometimes when installing an application, additional 3rd party applications may also be installed on the user's system.