The Term “Malware”, Essay Example

This essay investigates the term “malware,” and looks into the different kinds of malware that computer users may encounter in their daily activities.

Malware is a term given to refer to any program that is intended to do harm to a computer system or to people who are in any way connected to that system. According to Security agent Robert Moir from Microsoft, malware is a shortened term for malicious software, which is “a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code.” There are various kinds of malware that may be encountered by a computer user, these malware can be viruses, worms, or Trojan horses among others. A virus is a program that seeks to make the computer do something that it is not supposed to. This can be anything from deleting files in the computer or creating so many new files without the user’s consent with the purpose of filling up the computer’s storage space and making the system crash. While all viruses have the ability to reproduce themselves to a computer, a worm is a type of virus that can especially propagate itself across many computers. Thus, a worm can be more dangerous than other viruses because it can spread much faster and more uncontrollably. A Trojan horse is another malware. It is called a Trojan horse after its counterpart in Greek myth because like that wooden horse that tricked the opposing army to opening their gates, the Trojan horse is malware that is disguised as a harmless or even beneficial object, such as a computer game or a software add-on.

Work Cited

Moir, R. Defining Malware. 2003. 21 Nov 2010. Web.