Comment on can a hacker hack my accounts remotely??
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 10 months agoMost people consider any sort of “thing installed or running on my computer against my knowledge doing bad stuff” to be a virus.
That’s why the OP said “installing any virus in my computer”
zeppo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A virus is specifically malware that automatically spreads to other devices. It’s similar to a worm. They tend to spread surreptitiously using vulnerabilities or design flaws. To me that’s quite different than installing a shady browser plugin, and imo it’s better to use the term malware to make it clear privacy violating browser extensions are something people unfortunately choose to install, unlike a virus.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
A lot of the shady browser extensions don’t start shady, they get bought from the original creators and updated into something malicious.
Either way, your average non-technical person couldn’t tell you the difference, so it hardly matters.
zeppo@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s true, but it’s still not a virus and I’m not going to use an inaccurate term just because other people don’t understand the distinction.