We’ve all seen them – personality tests that ask you what type of animal you would have been if you’d been born an animal. Or what type of flower, or body of water, or even what type of book you would have been? But have you ever been asked what type of malware you would be, or which malware best suits your personality? Care to take the challenge? Picture yourself as malware facing an opponent. Which malware would you be?
Do you have an infectious personality that allows you to adapt to different physical environments, changing your behavior as needed, but never your basic features or objectives? When you’re upset, do you wreak havoc on whoever and whatever is around by infecting and wasting resources and just by making yourself a general nuisance? If that’s who you are, congratulations – you’re a virus!
Perhaps you identify as a nonstop, irritating source of meaningless and hurtful, even harmful information. If you do, then label yourself adware.
Fancy yourself as a planner and observer? Gathering information to use against your opponent, and then watching and observing to see just how much leverage you can attain from your data? This personality type earns you the title of ransomware.
Or maybe you take a more subtle approach, employing stealth to gather data that you will then use to your advantage. If this is your personality type, you’re without a doubt spyware.
On the other hand, if you tend to hang around as harmless as a fly on the wall until the need arises, and then take your opponent unawares while simultaneously unleashing surprise reinforcements on them too, you’re definitely a Trojan!
Not content to just go after just one opponent, but instead have to share the attack and spread out to as many as you can? Do you prefer to rely on your own innate ability to seek out and exploit vulnerabilities and then move onto the next vulnerability? That would make you a worm.
Then again, you might prefer a more stealthy approach, launching your attack away from watchful eyes, carefully wresting control of information away from your opponent. If that’s your personality type, you can call yourself a rootkit.
Of course, you could always be the personality type that likes to combine a few different malicious behaviors when you’re on the attack. In that case, consider yourself a hybrid.
So which one are you? Any of these malware match your personality? None of them? That’s okay, the point here was to learn a bit about malware, so… mission accomplished, we think! Although arguably, you probably didn’t learn quite enough to identify and remove them. And that’s why we use malware scanners!
