An Introduction to Malware: Its Definition and Characteristics

Malware is any software that is intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network. And the key thing here is to understand that it has to be intentional. There’s a lot of things like bugs in software that will build damages. Those are bugs unless they were intentionally put there. There are many types of malware, and these are some of the ones we’re going to talk about in this course. And those include Trojans, worms, ransomware, spyware, adware, viruses. We’ll get into hybrid malware. We’ll get into fileless attacks as we go along. Again, the key takeaway there is that malware is defined by its intent and its capabilities.

And as we go along, keep in mind that the intent is always going to be to be malicious. And what we’re really going to be talking about through the next several sections is the different capabilities. A worm has different capabilities than a typical virus, and that’s really what we want to focus on.