Whois & Analysis for scanscope.net

Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

The word is a neologism created as a homophone of fishing due to the similarity of using a bait in an attempt to catch a victim.

According to the 3rd Microsoft Computing Safer Index Report released in February 2014, the annual worldwide impact of phishing could be as high as $5 billion.

Malware, short for malicious software, is any software used to disrupt computer or mobile operations, gather sensitive information, gain access to private computer systems, or display unwanted advertising.

Before the term malware was coined by Yisrael Radai in 1990, malicious software was referred to as computer viruses.

The first category of malware propagation concerns parasitic software fragments that attach themselves to some existing executable content.

The fragment may be machine code that infects some existing application, utility, or system program, or even the code used to boot a computer system.

Malware is defined by its malicious intent, acting against the requirements of the computer user, and does not include software that causes unintentional harm due to some deficiency.

A computer virus is a type of malicious software program ("malware") that, when executed, replicates by reproducing itself (copying its own source code) or infecting other computer programs by modifying them.

Infecting computer programs can include as well, data files, or the "boot" sector of the hard drive.

When this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be "infected" with a computer virus.

The term "virus" is also commonly, but erroneously, used to refer to other types of malware.

"Malware" encompasses computer viruses along with many other forms of malicious software, such as computer "worms", ransomware, trojan horses, keyloggers, rootkits, spyware, adware, malicious Browser Helper Object (BHOs) and other malicious software.

The majority of active malware threats are actually trojan horse programs or computer worms rather than computer viruses.

The term computer virus, coined by Fred Cohen in 1985, is a misnomer.

Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected host computers, such as acquisition of hard disk space or central processing unit (CPU) time, accessing private information (e.g., credit card numbers), corrupting data, displaying political or humorous messages on the user's screen, spamming their e-mail contacts, logging their keystrokes, or even rendering the computer useless.

However, not all viruses carry a destructive "payload" and attempt to hide themselves—the defining characteristic of viruses is that they are self-replicating computer programs which install themselves without user consent.

Electronic mail, or email, is a method of exchanging digital messages between people using digital devices such as computers and mobile phones.

Email first entered substantial use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the form now recognized as email.

Email operates across computer networks, which today is primarily the Internet.

Some early email systems required the author and the recipient to both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging.

Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model.

Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages.

Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need to connect only briefly, typically to a mail server or a webmail interface, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

Shareware is a type of proprietary software which is initially provided free of charge to users, who are allowed and encouraged to make and share copies of the program.

Shareware is often offered as a download from an Internet website or as a compact disc included with a magazine.

Shareware is available on all major personal computer platforms.

The term shareware is used in contrast to open-source software, in which the source code is available for anyone to inspect and alter; and freeware, which is software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available.