The Life And Death Of The Creative Computer Virus

Once upon a time, there were viruses that simply annoyed or amused you without wiping your data or leaving your system compromised.

While early computer viruses were certainly capable of destruction and minor havoc, they were often designed simply for the hackers' own amusement and to deliver what's known as a "payload." It might be a message that tells you that cybertron69 has owned you, or it might be an elaborate animation with a political message. Hackers have moved on to using their time in more lucrative ways and just don't get around to putting that cherry on top anymore.

Now everyone either wants to rootkit your system and make it part of a botnet for organized crime, or you get script kiddies that want to DDoS anything they disagree with.

There aren't really any viruses anymore. Viruses infect other executables. Most malware these days are either worms or trojans.

damicatz said:

There aren't really any viruses anymore. Viruses infect other executables. Most malware these days are either worms or trojans.

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That's because writing complicated code in .ASM that reads PE headers, elevates to ring 0, is polymorphic, and network connected in 3000 bytes is hard. The new leet is a gals drive by download. Sad day indeed.

damicatz said:

There aren't really any viruses anymore. Viruses infect other executables. Most malware these days are either worms or trojans.

Click to expand...

The accepted definition in popular cybersecurity books, the key difference between a worm and virus is human interaction. A worm is viewed as an evolution (subset) of a virus because it does not need it.

Viruses are very popular when you can count on human action to launch the payload. The payload itself could be another form of malware (RAT,worm,adware,etc.).