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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SHA stands for Secure Hash Standard. It is a one way cryptographic algorithm. You can input any data to the function and it will output a “unique” hash number representing that data and there is theoretically no way of reversing the algorithm to get the data from this hash. SHA-1 was the first of these standards and produces a hash of 160 bits. But this was not enough after some time and SHA-2 came around and could produce several different outputs for future proofing, among other 256 bit and 512 bit output. But even this turned out to be too little so SHA-3 came along with an arbitrary length output. To distinguish between these different variants of the same algorithm we tend to call SHA-2 for SHA-256 or SHA-512 depending on the variant used and SHA-3 is called SHA3-256, SHA3-512 or say SHA-1024.
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