Viruses and Malware

Differentiate among virus, worm, trojan horse, and rootkit. In reference to malware, what is quarantine?

Virus is a potentially damaging computer program that affects or infects a computer negatively by altering the way the computer works without the user’s knowledge or permission.

Worm resides in active memory and replicates over a network to infect computers and devices, using up the system resources and possibly shutting down the system.

Trojan horse is a destructive program disguised as real problem, such as a screen saver. When a user runs a seemingly innocent program, a Trojan horse hiding inside can capture information, such as user names and passwords, from your computer or enable someone remotely to control your computer

Rootkit is program that easily can hide and allow someone to take full control of your computer from a remote location, often for nefarious purposes.  Rootkit can be dangerous and often requires special software to detect and remove.

If an antivirus program identifies an infected files, it attempts to remove the malware. It the antivirus program cannot remove the infection, it often quarantines the infected file. A quarantine is a separate area of a hard disk that holds the infected file until the infection can be removed. This step that other files will not become infected