The email virus¡¯ name says it all; the virus rides on an e-mail as an attachment
until someone curious enough might open the attachment.
E-mail viruses will, instead of copying themselves to surrounding files,
reproduce simply by using the e-mail program to send themselves out to (usually)
everyone found in the recipient¡¯s contact list.
The payload of an e-mail virus is (usually) not as destructive as the other
types. Typical email viruses simply use the recipient to broaden the amount of
people who receive the e-mail body¡¯s message. However, sometimes they are also
used to perform more malicious tasks, such as
DDoS attacking.
A DDoS attack, or Distributed Denial of Service attack is when a single system
sends commands to a network of many other systems to access a specific server or
web site, this coordinated traffic increase is meant to crash the target server.
