Welcome to DR's note, your weekly dose of knowledge from Circuit Stitch.

 This week we continue the series of Know thy enemy, and this week we talk about Worms.

    Worms are a strange sounding malware for a computer, but this is one of the most damaging viruses that can be on your devices.  Well, what are worms and how do they harm your devices.    Here is how Malwarebytes (a popular anti-malware software) defines worms, a computer worm is a subset of the Trojan horse malware that can propagate or self-replicate from one computer to another without human activation after breaching a system.  Basically, after you have installed the Trojan (the malware we talked about last week) and activated it, it will do its thing as it infects your system.  It will self-replicate in that it will create many of itself to not only hide in your system, and then it will send out these copies of itself to other systems connected to it.  It does this, infecting of connected systems across the internet or LAN(Local area network).  Once you are infected with the worm it can do several things other than the self-replicating, and they are; install other malware, consume bandwidth, delete files, overload networks, steal data, open a backdoor, and deplete hard drive space.  It's worth mentioning, there is a difference between a Computer worm and a worm virus.  The former doesn't need any human interaction for it to work and run itself, the latter does, you need to activate it for it to start on its journey of destroying systems. 

    There have been many types of computer worms out there, here are some of the more infamous ones that if you are curious give them a Google; Morris worm, Bagle (aka beagle, mitglieder, and lodeight), Blaster, Conficker, ILOVEYOU, mydoom, Ryuk, SQL Slammer, Storm Worm, Stuxnet, and most recently the WannaCry.  Now, the WannaCry was more of a ransomware attack, but had worm components in it to help it infect hundreds of thousands of computers over 150 countries in just a few hours.  Crazy stuff, this malware is no joke if you get infected.

    What are the symptoms of a computer worm, and how do you get rid of them?  First the former, you will notice your computer slows down, freezes, and crashes a lot.  It will also throw up error messages on a constant basis.  Some other things you could notice would be missing or corrupt files, rapidly depleting hard drive space even if are not downloading or installing anything new, and you may notice firewall breach alerts.  How do you get rid of them?  The best solution is to get a good antivirus or anti-malware (my suggestions are Malwarebytes, they have a good track record), but do not op-in to a free one as it will most likely not fix the issue you are trying to fix.  If you try and just get rid of the virus yourself you will find that it might be impossible, as several factors will come into play; the worm could be active(so the files are in use and can't be deleted), more than one worm process may be running (the act of stopping one can just have it restarted back up by another), it has hooks into registry links that make it incredible hard to pin down and delete, and finally it could have infected your back-up so that if you would try and just load a back-up of windows you will just load a back-up with the worm still infecting your system.  If you do not want to pay for anti-malware, then your only other option is to completely erase your hard drive and reinstall your operating system from scratch. 

I hope this have been a little enlightening for you on the dangers of a worm to your system and any systems connected to it.  As always, you can leave a comment below if you have any questions.  Thank you and have a great week.