Welcome back to all our readers. In this weeks exciting and fun-filled edition of The Weekly Geek we are going to continue on our quest to find out more about the malicious side of the internet and how to protect your computer.

This week we are going to delve into “worms”. No, not night crawlers, that is in the outdoors section of our friendly paper. We are discussing computer worms, which are, by definition, not a virus but act much the same way. They are self replicating, usually by searching not only your email contacts list but for any reference to any email address on your computer, generally they do not cause direct damage like a virus does.

Instead worms are intended to clog up the processor’s time (the brains of your computer) and slow down network traffic (your internet connection) by reproducing so many times that they effective overload the infected systems. This is called a Denial of Service (DoS) attack or a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Worms usually live in active memory and not on the hard drive. Continue reading →