Computer technology - Dissecting The Virus
All of us know the importance of having adequate antivirus protection before venturing online. But how exactly does a virus work? What makes viruses differ from worms, and how has the sophistication of both increased over the years? Ever since it started to develop alongside the first home computers, malware has become an increasingly virulent and ingenious threat. But that threat is evolving fast. Nowadays, it’s not only internet users who are at risk, but also website owners, whose poorly written web applications are being exploited and used to plant malicious code that infects others through the browser.
An emerging infection vector is the ‘SQL injection’, which can turn the tables by compromising websites to serve up malware to web browsers. It works because a fault on the website makes it possible to pass SQL statements directly to the back-end database. Last year’s Winzipices.cn worm used this form of attack. Using a bug in the MySQL database engine, it stored malicious JavaScript in over 500,000 websites. When read out again by a web browser, the code was executed. This redirected browsers through a sequence of sites to the Chinese phishing site www.winzipices.cn.
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