I commonly see SHA-256 or SHA-1 on virus tests on malware but I don’t really know what it means. what is the number mean after the – and how are all of them different?
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Secure Hashing Algorithm. Essentially a complicated one-way math function, which takes an arbitrarily-sized input (in this case, an entire file on a computer) and creates a specific random-looking output. Importantly, it’s not *truly* random, if you give it the same input, you’ll get the same output every time, but you change anything at all and the output changes completely.
The reason you do this for something like a virus check is so you can know that a piece of software hasn’t been changed; if anything is changed about it, you’d get a different hash from what you expect.
SHA-1 and SHA-2 were older standards, SHA-256 is the current standard, which ought to hold up a heck of a lot longer even with more and more powerful computers. With SHA-1 and 2, it’s possible to deliberately change a file in such a way that you get the same output from the altered version as the original, meaning you can insert malware and still have the same hash.
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