21st December 2001
"There's a new worm on the loose! It carries a trojan which will download a virus onto your computer and..." Education is the best form of protection. Installing the latest software patches won't hurt, either. You know nasties by their more common names, though sometimes you'll see them appended with weird prefixes and suffixes. What do they mean? VBS. is a Visual Basic script; W32. is a 32-bit binary aimed at the Windows platform; OM. is an Office Macro virus which could infect Word, Excel, or Access documents; WM. is a Word Macro virus that usually attaches itself to the NORMAL.DOT file; DoS. is a Denial of Service helper; IRC. may very well infect your mIRC scripts. These are the most common prefixes you'll see. What about suffixes? "@m" is a worm mailer which looses itself every time you send e-mail; "@mm" is a mass mailer with which we're most familiar; "Family" designates extreme similarities to another nasty; "Gen" designates a similar threat type; "Worm" represents code that replicates and sends itself over a network. Any additional letter will typically signify a code revision. If you need more information, the keywords are: Virus Naming Conventions.