Malware

[Writer's Name]

[Institution Name]

Malware

Introduction

The paper discusses the causes and effects of a malware that is used for data security breach and manipulating confidential information of the people for negative use. The content covers the types of malware, use of malware, a case on malware and the preventive measures to avoid destruction caused by malware.

Malware

Internet Malware is software designed to harm a computer system or directly to its owner (Leithauser, 2010). It may also be a legitimate program as such, whose use is diverted for malicious purposes. The term malware is a contraction of malicious software, meaning malicious software. A malware usually does the following destruction:

Infect files and make them unusable (not including the use of software for disinfection)

To hinder or prevent certain applications from the target computer to run (or even completely block the operating system)

Disable security software to better target the infecting files

Delete or encrypt files created by the user (text documents, spreadsheets, pictures, music, etc.)

Intercept accounts and passwords to impersonate the victim on the Web, or even steal money from a financial website

Vulnerabilities used by malware

There are several factors that make the system more vulnerable to malware; homogeneity, bugs, code unconfirmed, over-privileged user and over-privileged code (Menn, 2011). One cause of the vulnerability of networks is homogeneity of multiuser software. For example, when all the computers on a network run the same operating system if that system can be compromised, it might affect any computer you use. In particular, Microsoft Windows has the most operating systems market; this allows malware to infect a large number of computers without having to adapt malicious software to different operating systems ('Post-stuxnet', 2011).

Most software and operating systems contain bugs that can be exploited by malware. Typical examples are buffer overflow (buffer overflow), in which the structure designed to store data in a given area of memory allows it to be occupied by more data than will fit on writing other parts of memory (Clayton, 2011). This can be used by malware to force the system to execute their malicious code. The USB sticks infected can damage the computer during start-up.

Originally computers were to be booted as with a diskette and until recently it was common to be the default boot device (Hudson, 2011). This meant that a contaminated floppy disk could damage the computer at boot time, and the same applies to CD and USB. While this is less common now, it remains possible to forget that the computer is started by default on removable media, and security should not normally be any diskette, CD, etc, to turn on the computer. To address this security issue just enter the BIOS of the computer and change the start mode of the computer (Gruper and Elzam, 2001).

In some systems, a non-administrator users are over designed for the privileged, that is, they can change the internal structure of the system, because they have been granted administrative privileges inadequate or equivalent. This Decision shall be the default settings in Microsoft Windows systems; the problem is too privileged ...