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One issue here is, who gets to define these terms? The technical definitions of these various forms of attack comes to us by way of those who created them, but the meanings become interpreted over time throught the use and misuse of them by the general public. Words mean what you use them to mean. Whose definition is authoritative? FWIW, here are the definitions as I have come to know them: Virus: any program capable of replicating itself in some manner. Worm: any program which automatically seeks to gain entrance to remote systems, and which when it succeeds, starts a new instance of itself on the new host Trojan: any program which secretly does something other than what it purports to do Backdoor: any program used to provide a non-conventional means of remotely accessing a system Bot: any program which automatically intercepts events and acts on them on behalf of its user So then, a worm is a specific kind of virus, because it self-replicates. Many of the other definitions of these terms I've seen place arbitrary restrictions on them, such as "it propogates by e-mail" or "it contains X form of malware" -- in general, these additional restrictions are artificial, deriving from more common examples of such malware, and from more common usages in modern language. These classifications are intented to be a bit more general than that. It is also worth noting that it is possible to have examples of all of these which are not malicious in intent, though you may have to use your imagination to come up with useful examples... I leave that as an exercise for the reader. :) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail. Sorry for the inconvenience. Thank the spammers. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://lists.blu.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20030820/454137b9/attachment.sig>
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