CompTIA: Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) Exam Prep

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.

Key Takeaway: 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.