What is a computer worm?
A program that resides in the active memory of a computer and duplicates itself; for example, from one disk drive to another, or by copying itself using email or another transport mechanism. Once the worm has infected your system, it may automatically send out emails containing more copies of the virus using the address book in your email program. The worm may do damage and compromise the security of the computer. It may arrive in the form of a joke program or software of some sort. Unlike a virus, it does not attach itself to a host program.
A computer worm is a software program that is designed to copy itself from one computer to another, without human interaction. Unlike a computer virus, a worm can copy itself automatically. Worms can replicate in great volume. For example, a worm can send out copies of itself to every contact in your e-mail address book, and then it can send itself to all of the contacts in their e-mail address books. Some worms spread very quickly. They clog networks and can cause long waits for you (and everyone else) to view Web pages on the Internet. You might have heard of specific computer worms, including the Sasser worm and the Blaster worm. The most recent worm is called the Conficker worm. To help prevent infections by and to get rid of the Conficker worm and worms like it, visit the Windows Live OneCare Safety Scanner or the Malicious Software Removal Tool. If you have automatic updating turned on, the Malicious Software Removal Tool runs on your computer every month. For more basic informat
A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. A virus attaches itself to, and becomes part of, another executable program; a worm is self-contained and does not need to be part of another program to propagate itself. The name ‘worm’ was taken from The Shockwave Rider, a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner. Researchers writing an early paper on experiments in distributed computing noted the similarities between their software and the program described by Brunner and adopted the name. The first worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm, was written by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. at the MIT Artificial intelligence Laboratory. It was released on November 2, 1988, and quickly infected a great many computers on the Internet at the time. It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD Unix and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received 3 years’ probation, community service and a fine in
