Studying and Classification of the Most Significant Malicious Software
📝 Abstract
As the cost of information processing and Internet accessibility falls, most organizations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to potential cyber threats which its rate has been dramatically increasing every year in recent times. In this paper, we study, discuss and classify the most significant malicious software: viruses, Trojans, worms, adware and pornware which have made step forward in the science of Virology.
💡 Analysis
As the cost of information processing and Internet accessibility falls, most organizations are becoming increasingly vulnerable to potential cyber threats which its rate has been dramatically increasing every year in recent times. In this paper, we study, discuss and classify the most significant malicious software: viruses, Trojans, worms, adware and pornware which have made step forward in the science of Virology.
📄 Content
1
Studying and Classification of the Most
Significant Malicious Software
Dr. Wajeb GHARIBI,
Computer Science & Information Systems College, Jazan University,
Jazan, KSA.
gharibi@jazanu.edu.sa
Abstract—As the cost of information processing and Internet
accessibility
falls,
most
organizations
are
becoming
increasingly vulnerable to potential cyber threats which its
rate has been dramatically increasing every year in recent
times.
In this paper, we study, discuss and classify the most
significant malicious software: viruses, Trojans, worms,
adware and pornware which have made step forward in the
science of Virology.
Keywords: Informatics; information Security; Virolog;
Cyber threats.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, there is a huge variety of cyber threats that
can be quite dangerous not only for big companies but also
for ordinary user, who can be a potential victim for
cybercriminals when using unsafe system for entering
confidential data, such as login, password, credit card
numbers, etc. Among popular computer threats it is
possible to distinguish several types of them depending on
the means and ways they are realized. They are: malicious
software (malware), DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial-of-
Service), phishing, banking, exploiting vulnerabilities,
botnets, threats for mobile phones, IP-communication
threats, social networking threats and even spam. All of
these threats try to violate one of the following criteria:
confidentiality,
integrity
and
accessibility.
Lately,
malicious software has turned into a big business. Cyber
criminals became profitable organizations and able to
perform any type of attack. An understanding of today‘s
cyber threats is vital part for safe computing and ability to
counteract the cyber invaders.
The rest of our paper is organized as follows: Section 2
demonstrates the theory of computer viruses. Section 3
proposes the history: from the first viruses till the last
epidemics. Section 4 defines and classifies Malware.
Conclusions have been made in Section5.
II. THEORY OF COMPUTER VIRUSES
The history begins in 1983, when American scientist Fred
Cohen in the dissertational work devoted to research of
self-reproducing computer programs for the first time has
proposed the term ‗computer virus‘ and later on published
the article «Computer Viruses: theory and experiments»[1].
Len Eidelmen first coined the term ‘virus’ in connection
with self-replicating computer programs. On November
10th, 1983, at a seminar on computer safety at Lehigh
University, this grandfather of modern computer virology,
demonstrated a virus-like program on a VAX11/750
system[2].
Nevertheless, the idea for computer viruses actually
appeared much earlier. Many consider the starting point to
be the work of John Von Neumann in his studies on self-
reproducing mathematical automata, famous in the 1940s.
By 1951, Neumann had already proposed methods for
demonstrating how to create such automata. In 1959, the
British mathematician Lionel Penrose presented his view
on automated self-replication in his Scientific American
article ‘Self-Reproducing Machines’. Unlike Neumann,
Penrose described a simple two dimensional model of this
structure which could be activated, multiply, mutate and
attack. Shortly after Penrose’s article appeared, Frederick
G. Stahl reproduced this model in machine code on an IBM
650 [3]. It should be noted that these studies were never
intended to providing a basis for the future development of
computer viruses. On the contrary, these scientists were
striving to perfect this world and make it more suitable for
human life. Afterwards, these works established the
foundation for many later studies such as robotics and
artificial intelligence.
III. HISTORY: FROM THE FIRST VIRUSES TILL THE LAST
EPIDEMICS
Sometime in the early 1970s, the Creeper virus was
detected on ARPANET, a US military computer network
which was the forerunner of the modern Internet. Written
for the then-popular Tenex operating system, this program
was able to gain access independently through a modem
and copy itself to the remote system. As computers gained
in popularity, more and more individuals started writing
their own programs. Advances in telecommunications
provided convenient channels for sharing programs through
open-access servers such as BBS - the Bulletin Board
System.
Elk Cloner virus infected the boot sector for Apple II
computers and spread by infecting the operating system,
stored on floppy disks.
Brain was the first global IBM-compatible virus epidemic,
which infected the boot sector, and was able to spread
practically worldwide within a few months. It was written
by a 19-year-old Pakistani programmer, Basit Farooq Alvi,
and his brother Amjad, and included a text string
2
containing their names, address and telephone number. Interestingly enough, Brain was the first ‘stealth virus.’; when on
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