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?
In: 3
It’s a hash. Think about the number:
1098710329581263501982375122304965872340698273464326323509283752039857230958725
Now is that the exact right number we want? How do we check? Well we could send you the exact same number, or we could sum up all the digits together and just send that. If I send you this special number, and tell you the JustAddTheDigitsTogetherHash for my special number is 9. Then you can tell if I sent you the right number. But with this terribly simple hash, any number has a 1 out of 10 chance of yeilding 9. SHA1 was the first in it’s line. The second included SHA256 which uses 256 bits.
You can run a hash on just about anything and get a number out that lets you identify it later. Using hashes on viruses let’s us know when a program is a among a list of known viruses with known hashes. (offer not available for polymorphic code).
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