In today's society, computers are extremely commonplace and are used for a variety of tasks at work, as well as in the home. This prevalence of computers in homes and at work, have produced an increasing need for protection of the threats to computer systems and their data from harm, theft, and unauthorized use. These various threats include, but are not limited to, viruses, worms, and hackers. .
I always believed that viruses and worms were one in the same. Through my research, I have discovered that worms and viruses are indeed different, but often have similar effects to the computers they attack. "A virus is a piece of program code that, like a biological virus, makes copies of itself and spreads by attaching itself to a host, often damaging the host in the process. The host is another computer program, often a computer operating system, which then infects the applications that are transferred to other computers. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. The main difference between the two is that a virus attaches itself to, and becomes part of, another executable program, while a worm is self-contained; it does not need to be part of another program to propagate itself. In addition to replication, a worm may be designed to do any number of things, such as delete files on a host system, or send documents via email." (www.wikepedia.org, 9/8/2003) There are many people who are dedicated to identifying and creating protections against various viruses and worms. Unfortunately, a lot of this information is not generated until after a threat is posed, meaning, that protection against theses two threats cannot be created until the virus/worm has been created. After all, you cannot protect against something you do not know about. The people who create such viruses and worms are known as hackers.
A hacker is someone one who likes to overcome or circumvent limitations, in their field of computer programming.