PC Magazine: Test Your Security IQ

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Your security software says it offers "antivirus" protection, but in reality it protects against many other kinds of malware. See if you can identify the different types in our security IQ quiz.

By Neil J. Rubenking
May 9, 2013

In 1983, an engineering student named Fred Cohen created a self-replicating program, just to prove it could be done. Cohen's program hid its code inside a "host" program and successfully replicated itself, infecting other computers. Cohen coined the term "computer virus" to describe this kind of self-replicating parasitic program, and the term gained widespread adoption. Everybody knows what a virus is! When Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie Independence Day knocked out an alien mothership by uploading a computer virus, nobody said, "Huh? What's that?"

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