Unlike a virus, a worm aims at eating up the resources on a computer network and brings the entire network to a grinding halt due to the ensuing resource crunch. A worm is a small piece of software that exploits a security loophole in a computer system attached to a network to replicate itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has the same security hole.
When any such machine is discovered, it copies itself to the new machine exploiting the same security flaw and starts replicating from there as well. This process continues unabated. In this way, a worm continues to copy itself from machine to machine while eating up the computer time and network bandwidth in the process and they may also have some sinister intent. An infectious worm could clog the Internet very effectively and bring the global network to a standstill due to a severe resource crunch.
Emmanuel Aigbehi
No comments:
Post a Comment