CompTIA Security+ Exam Prep

Category - Management

Which of the following viruses could attach itself to the boot sector of your disk to avoid detection and report false information about file sizes?
  1. Boot sector virus
  2. Stealth virus
  3. Polymorphic virus
  4. Worm
Explanation
Answer: B - A stealth virus reports false information to hide itself from antivirus software. Stealth viruses often attach themselves to the boot sector of an operating system.

A stealth virus is a file virus that uses special techniques to hide its presence from users and virus scanners. They achieve this by intercepting the read request to the file and returning the content of the original read request to the uninfected file. Once the computer is infected, the virus makes modifications to allow the computer to look like it has not lost any memory and/or that the file size has not changed. When an antivirus program tries to detect the virus, the stealth virus feeds the antivirus program a clean image of the file or boot sector.
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Additional Answers

John Doe says:

if a virus attaches itself to the boot sector then it is, by definition, a 'boot sector virus' - answer A is technically correct

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