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Glossary

Virus Hoaxes

Hoaxes are not viruses, but are usually deliberate or unintentional e-messages warning people about a virus or other malicious software program. Some hoaxes cause as much trouble as viruses by causing massive amounts of unnecessary e-mail.
Most hoaxes contain one or more of the following characteristics:

Warnings about alleged new viruses and its damaging consequences,

Demands the reader forward the warning to as many people as possible,

Pseudo-technical "information" describing the virus,

Bogus comments from officials: FBI, software companies, news agencies, etc.
If you receive an e-mail message about a virus, check with a reputable source to ensure the warning is real. Click here to learn about hoaxes and the damage they cause. Sometimes hoaxes start out as viruses and some viruses start as hoaxes, so both viruses and virus hoaxes should be considered a threat.

 

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- ZIP File

- Worm

- Windows Scripting

- Warm Boot

- Virus Hoaxes

- Virus

- Variant

- Vaccination

- VBS

- Tunneling

- Trojan Horse Program

- Triggered Event

- Timestamp

- Time Bomb

- TSR

- System Boot Record

- Stealth Virus

- Sparse Infector

- Sniffer

- Slow Infector

- Signature

- Shareware

- Shared Drive

- Self-garbling Viruses

- Self-extracting Files

- Self-encrypting Virus

- Sector Viruses

- Scanner

- SMTP

- Resident Virus

- Replication

- Redirect

- Real-time Scanner

- RTF File

- Program Infector

- Polymorphic Virus

- Piggyback

- Payload

- Password Sniffing

- Password Attacks

- PGP

- Overwriting Virus

- Operating System

- On-demand Scanner

- On-access Scanner

- Not In The Wild

- NTFS

- Mutating Virus

- Mutant

- Multipartite Virus

- Memory-resident Virus

- Master Boot Sector Virus

- Master Boot Sector

- Master Boot Record

- Malware

- Malicious Code

- Macro Virus

- Macro

- MS-DOS

- MP3 File

- MBR

- Logic Bomb

- Library File

- Key

- Joke Programs

- JavaScript

- Infection

- Host

- Hole

- Hijacking

- Heuristic Analysis

- Firewall

- File Viruses

- FAT

- Encryption

- Encrypted Virus

- EXE file

- Dropper

- Disinfection

- Direct Action Virus

- Denial Of Service (DoS)

- DOS

- Cookie

- Companion Virus

- Cold Boot

- Cluster Virus

- Checksum

- Boot Sector Infector

- Boot Sector

- Boot Record

- Boot

- Batch files

- Backup

- Background Task

- Background Scanning

- Back Door

- BIOS

- Antivirus Virus

- Anti-virus Software