Scareware – tries to frighten victims through pop-ups or banners indicating infection and then funneling them into buying software (typically that they don’t need) or providing financial data.Ransomware – encrypts critical files while demanding a ransom to be paid to the perpetrator to do the decryption (provided they’re true to their word).Worms – a standalone self-replicating program exploiting a vulnerability in the system (which is why you want to stay up-to-date with security updates on the software you use).In addition to computer viruses, other forms of malware include: So I became sensitized to the possibility of computer viruses and ultimately malware since that time, but over the years, they’ve become quite sophisticated so countermeasures have also evolved accordingly. It got so bad that depending on what was going on with the computer, those spontaneous keystrokes would cause the computer to crash or hang. What would happen was that I type or enter a keystroke (normally for playing games but it could also be when writing a report in a word processor), and then the virus would suddenly replicate a particular keystroke hundreds (maybe thousands of times). My first personal experience with viruses happened back in the late 80s when my 486 PC was infected with the keypress virus. Heck, some have been capable of even reformatting a drive! Viruses are known to delete or encrypt files as well as modify the behavior of applications or even get into the operating system and disable various (critical) functions. MalwareBytes exposed me to that possibility back in 2016. This virus scanner targets viruses, which is one form of malware, but there is actually a larger class of malware of which viruses are just a member of. In the past, antivirus companies targeted only viruses while antimalware companies, which were newer to the game, targeted the stuff that antivirus companies didn’t catch or target in their detection schemes. You could even argue that the only difference between the companies that claim to be antivirus versus anti malware pretty much comes down to branding! However, in the digital space, it does its thing by attaching or injecting code to programs that then activate upon execution.īoth the terms malware and virus are used interchangeably, and I suspect this is the case because antivirus and anti-malware / antimalware programs (MalwareBytes was considered the latter) have pretty much converged in terms of the protection services offered over the years. To make a long story short, malware is a generalized catch-all term encompassing any type of malicious software.Ī virus is a specific class of malware that replicates itself (just like real viruses do). 7) MalwareBytes What Is The Difference Between Malware and Viruses?
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