Thread: release mode compilation

Originally posted by Traveller
My comments were not exaclty pointed towards you rather the seeming misunderstanding of viruses on this post, I believe that it is more vocabulary than anything else however.[...] Also for attaching 'viruses' I believe the corrext term here is a trojan horse. Which is a bug embedded in a program which could spawn a virus (a program which multiplies and attaches itself to other programs) or a worm( a program which moves around however generally keeping only one copy [I choose not to get into a multiheaded one at this point]) or that simply just does something at a predetermined point.

Yes. It's a vocabulary problem. But you didn't get it right either.

A virus is a virus is a virus... there's nothing of a trojan horse in a virus. They are completely different in architecture and capabilities. A virus is a program that has the ability to copy itself and attach this copy to other programs. These other programs, when fired up, will execute the virus and thus repeat the process, ad eternum... These infected programs can indeed be labeled "trojan horses". But that's more a slang than anything else. A virus is in fact a wonderful piece of software design.

A trojan horse is a disguised program that, behind a cape of apparent benignity, hides malefic code. Very few trojans spawn viruses or copy themselves, simply because of 2 things:
1. trojans horses that copy themselves would be easily spoted by the system as they are independent units. Not like a virus that only exists within another executable.
2. Trojans horses are indeed piece of crap software. Made by lamers that don't understand their system well enough to take the plunge into lower level virus coding. They simply don't know how to.

A Worm is similar to a virus. Difference here is that it is designed to operate under networks. It does not keep only one copy as you say. In fact, a worm creates several copies of itself as it moves through the network. It does this by "entering" a computer, spawn a copy and "inserting" this new copy in the network again. The computer stays infected while the worm moves through the network to infect some more.

There is a big difference between a trojan horse and a virus, virii operate by themselves, and a trojan horse is a remote-access program, requiring another individual to control it.