In the real world game of keep-away, two people toss a ball back and forth while a third person - the man in the middle - tries to intercept the ball while its enroute. In the cyberworld, the game of keep-away gets a new twist; the two players have no idea the man in the middle (MITM) exists.

It's almost as certain as death and taxes - the 'it' being the constant recycling of the age old conspiracy theory surrounding antivirus vendors. The (very) tired story usually takes one of two themes: that antivirus vendors are the ones creating the viruses; or that antivirus vendors have no real motive to do a good job because they are profiting from the existence of these viruses.

A false negative is the polar opposite of a false positive. A false negative occurs when a virus scanner fails to detect a virus in an infected file. The antivirus scanner may fail to detect the virus because the virus is new and no signature is yet available, or it may fail to detect because of configuration settings or even faulty signatures.

In the antivirus world, a signature is an algorithm or hash (a number derived from a string of text) that uniquely identifies a specific virus. Depending on the type of scanner being used, it may be a static hash which, in its simplest form, is a calculated numerical value of a snippet of code unique to the virus.

In its simplest form, a keylogger trojan is malicious, surreptitious software that monitors your keystrokes, logging them to a file and sending them off to remote attackers. Some keyloggers are sold as commercial software - the type a parent might use to record their children's online activities or a suspicious spouse might install to keep tabs on their partner.

"A Computer Virus", noting that "a virus can spread throughout a computer system or network using the authorizations of every user using it to infect their programs. Every program that gets infected may also act as a virus and thus the infection grows."

A Trojan is a self-contained program that appears to be legitimate, but in fact does something malicious. Trojans do not infect other files as viruses do, nor do Trojans make copies of themselves as worms do.

A boot sector virus is spread via infected floppy disks. This typically occurs when users inadvertently leave a floppy disk in drive A. When the system is next started, the PC will attempt to boot from the floppy.

It reads like something out of a sci-fi novel - RFID chips with the potential to disrupt supply chains and shutdown airport operations. Unfortunately, this particular tale may be more science than fiction.

Babylonia is a memory resident Windows-based virus with worm and automatic update capabilities. The virus infects PE EXE (Windows Portable Executables) and HLP (Windows Help files). It also patches Windows socket library WSOCK32.DLL to send its copies to Internet and drops additional component that is able to download and install 'virus plugins' from Internet.