What is a Computer Worm Virus?

Computer worm is a malicious program that will spread over the connected network. This differs largely from the computer virus. Computer virus is dependent on some other program to run itself i.e. it needs a host program and then it runs as a part of it. However, the computer worm is completely different, it can run on its own, and it multiplies. Although it can run and stand without any host program but still some of the computer worms make use of the host programs for running. The history of computer worms is almost two decades long.

First computer worm was made and spread across the internet by the person named Robert Tappan Morris. Although still it is not clear whether he intentionally did it or it happened by chance. This computer worm was named the Internet Worm and it made use of the fingerd, sendmail options to reach across the internet world.

Other famous worms included the slammer worm and the blaster worm. Both of these spread in 2003 and used the vulnerability of the Microsoft SQL server and Microsoft DCOM RPC respectively to reach out on the internet network. Some of the worms like Melissa, Sobig, Mydoom used the email to spread themselves and lured the user into opening the file attachment of the email. Therefore, in this sense they had some similarity with the Trojan horse. While the Mydoom had another dimension to it that it spread through the P2P sharing also and used applications like Kazaa.

You need to protect your computer against such computer worms and for that you should download and install the patches that are provided by operations systems and various software providers. You should also be careful in not opening the email attachments that are suspicious. These attachments can be in the form of exe files as well as Microsoft word or excels sheets.

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