Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!hubcap!gatech!uflorida!ukma!david From: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip Subject: Re: Virus Terminology Survey Message-ID: <10608@s.ms.uky.edu> Date: 23 Nov 88 20:58:54 GMT References: <93400013@p.cs.uiuc.edu> Reply-To: david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) Organization: U of Kentucky, Mathematical Sciences Lines: 46 In article <93400013@p.cs.uiuc.edu> zweig@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: There was an etymology of software (something like that -- that is, a list much like this one) published in the immediately previous issue of Whole Earth Review. That list might or might not be complete but would definitely lead you to other sources.. One of my professors has some minor points on a couple of these definitions. I'll do my best to repeat them to you guys. >VIRUS -- a program which replicates itself and causes damage; so-called > because of similatrites to viruses which make people/animals sick. One feature of a virus is that it cannot live on it's own, that is it must be part of another creature to live. The same should be true of computer viruses, and is true of many of them. The Amiga boot block virus is an example. >WORM -- a program which copies itself to other systems over a network. > Sometimes it seems to be taken for granted that worms are nasty, others > it seems necessary to add modifiers to that effect. One feature of a worm is that it has many segments, and so should a software worm. That is, it should have a lot of segments, one in each host machine that it's inhabiting, etc. That paper from a long time ago about the experiments at Xerox give good examples of what I mean. >TROJAN HORSE -- a program which sits on a system until someone runs it; > then it attacks the system using the priviledges of whoever activated > it. Since this term is taken from Greek mythology, a TH is always nasty > (the image is something that you let into your address-space/file system > and something leaps out of it and kills you). I think a better way to put this is that it looks perfectly normal from the outside. But once accepted it then makes its attack. It wouldn't necessarily have to be *on* the system to begin with but could possibly be brought in from outside somehow (remember, the historical trojan horse was brought in from outside too) before being run. -- <-- David Herron; an MMDF guy <-- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET <-- <-- Controlled anarchy -- the essence of the net.