kpatz
MY HEAD A SPLODE
Premium
join:2003-06-13
Manchester, NH
1 edit | reply to Jim Gurd
Re: Terminology
It depends on how you define terms like "worm," "virus" and "trojan".
If you assume that a worm spreads itself and a virus has to be launched in order to spread, then Sober could be considered a virus.
However, the classic definition of a virus is code that spreads by infecting other code, e.g. executables, documents, or the boot sectors on floppy and hard disks, and is propagated via the sharing of infected files or disks. Worms on the other hand don't infect other executables, instead they proactively spread themselves over a network (which can including mass emailing). So by that definition, Sober is a worm.
A Trojan Horse, by its classic definition, is a program that does something malicious while claiming to be innocent. A classic Trojan would be one that claims to be a cool game or screensaver but it does bad things when you run it. By that definition, pretty much any email worm can be considered a Trojan as well, but by definition Trojans don't spread on their own.
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SMTP: Spam and Malware Transfer Protocol. Also used on rare occasion to transmit e-mail messages. |
