• Question: What is so bad about software malware

    Asked by Finn to Barbara, Matt, Ravinder, Sophie, Tristan on 13 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Matthew Moore

      Matthew Moore answered on 13 Mar 2015:

      Because it can allow people to invade other peoples privacy, it can delete files that people need and disrupt their software. Malware (in various forms) can also take over your hardware, turning on your webcam without you knowing or breaking the fans so your laptop sets on fire (it’s happened).

      And of course, if malware were to infect government computers safeguarding nuclear weapons for example this would be a problem, or were used to shut down nuclear plants –it would be a disaster!

      Malware just stands for malicious software so by definition is intent on causing harm!

    • Photo: Barbara Shih

      Barbara Shih answered on 14 Mar 2015:

      Malware is a general term to describe a number of different malicious software (such as computer viruses, worms, trojan horses, spyware… etc). Adding to what Matt mentioned, malware can turn your PC into a zombie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie_%28computer_science%29), which can then used by hackers to carry out distributed denial-of-service attack (DDos) that shuts down the website/server of big companies governments.This is done by flooding the victim with requests by hundreds of thousands of computer at the same time. This happened to microsoft xbox and Sony playstation last december, when no one can log on their account for several hours.

Comments