Love Bug Research Paper

The Love Bug Virus
Done By: Michael Bagen
Professor Pullen
CIS 109
7/19/2013

When I originally read the name of the assignment I thought I’d be writing about Herbie, the famous love bug. I thought to myself well that certainly can’t be right so after reading the requirements for the paper I quickly realized I was right. It was not about the car. It was about something that effected a lot more people then a silly movie ever could. This Love Bug unlike the car was a virus that was embedded in emails as love letters and once clicked it dispersed itself in rapid form. Infecting more then 50 million computers over a span of ten days. I’d be lucky if I talk to ten different people over the span of ten days no less 50 million, that statistic
They don’t know the half of it. The worm is where crap really hits the fan if you will. Going back to our best friend the love bug, that was actually a worm and not a virus. The biggest difference between the two,“A worm is a standalone program that doesn’t require user intervention to spread. Worms don’t infect existing files – they spread copies of themselves instead.” (Hoffman, 2012.) Meaning it does not need a host to leach onto spread. Also worms can be remotely accessed and used, viruses cannot. Worms typically use holes in the operating systems and back doors. Viruses need human interaction to be spread across computers whether it be sending a file by way of email or putting a file on a thumb drive. Though it does need to be physically transferred. In terms of how bad they are to a system and or network though it does differ. “Worms that spread over the network can generate a large amount of traffic, slowing down the network.” (Hoffman, 2012) A worm will make things run very slow may even make your computer restart multiple times. A virus can do similar things but a virus will corrupt files on your hard drive even possibly erase the entire thing. From what I’ve read granted the worm effects a lot more computers which for networked computers it would be a nightmare. I will have to say the virus sounds more dangerous. If your computer isn’t backed up or the important files are saved
Choosing a Windows OS from the start in todays day and age isn’t the best decision one can make. Granted Windows is the most widely known and used OS it comes at a price. It’s also the easiest to spread malicious content through. I prefer a Mac which is built off of a Unix OS in a Unix OS everything isn’t line by line code. It is more of a circular code, everything needs to feed off of what came before it. So if a line of virus code just randomly showed up it would spit it back out since the OS isn’t used to it. Whereas in a windows environment it would take that code and run with it because all of it’s I’s and T’s don’t have to be dotted and crossed for it to move on. It is possible to have a secure Windows computer it is just a lot harder to do then using a competing OS. There are Anti Virus software that’ll help find viruses but the rate people are putting them out when you ‘update’ your anti virus it’s already out of date. With OS X on Mac it’s not as rapid. I’m not saying it’s it can’t ever get attacked or anything like that but to do harm to a Mac it is considerably harder then to do it to a windows computer. Like I said there are plenty of things you can do to make ones computer more secure but one of the biggest things ultimately be what operating system you choose from the