Question

Explain mode of operation of computer worm.

Answer 1

• Usually, a computer worm does not harm other programs or data.
• It just spreads, thereby consuming large resources such as transmission capacity or disk storage. It denies services to legitimate users.
• A computer worm usually operates on a network. Each node on the network maintains a “mailing list”, which contains the names and addresses of the reachable machines on the network. The worm gets access to this list and,d using this, sends a copy of itself to all those addresses.
• If the worm is intelligent, after reaching a node, it checks whether a copy of itself already exists there or not. If it exists, it does not create one more copy.
• If the worm is dumb, it just copies itself to all nodes. So, if one node’s address is in several places in the network, then it would have several copies of the worm.