Software

Types of Software

System software.

System software is essential for computer hardware to be functional and useful. It is designed to control
the operations of a computer and coordinate all external devices. It manages all the computer
resources like memory and processor time System software provides a useful link between user and
computer. It also assists the computer in the efficient control, support, development and execution of
application software. Some common types of system software are:

• Operating System. Operating System is the software that manages all the computers‘
resources to optimize its performance provides common services for efficient execution of
various application software and acts as an interpreter between the hardware, application
programs and the user. It provides various services from system booting to shutdown e.g.
process management, memory management, file management, I/O management, security, etc.
It will be covered in detail in further lectures.
• Server Progams. Server programs are dedicated computer programs that run as services and
serve the needs or requests of other programs. These services may run on a dedicated
hardware or on the same computer as the requesting program. Various types of server
programs include web server, print server, file server for shared files, data base server, mail
server etc.
• Device drivers. Device drivers are shared computer programs that provide an interface between
the hardware devices and operating system or other higher level programs. a specific software
program to control each hardware device attached to the computer. Device drivers are
hardware dependent and operating system specific.
• Communication software. network operating system allows computers to communicate with
each other. It enables sharing and transferring of data across the network. It controls network
operations and manages network security.

Application Software. Application software is designed and developed to accomplish one or more
specific task or solve a particular problem.

• Word processor. used to create, edit, format, save, view or print any text based document like
letters, memos, reports, etc. MS Word is an example of word processing software.
• Spreadsheet. numeric data-analysis tool. E.g. MS Excel
• DBMS. Database management system. used to store, maintain, manipulate and organize a
large set of data e.g. oracle
• Presentation software. E.g. MS power point
• Multimedia software e.g. Adobe photoshop, Movie maker etc.
• Entertainment and Games
• Education and Research
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 Utility software. Utility programs help manage, maintain and control computer resources. These
programs are available to help you with the day-to-day chores associated with personal computing and
to keep your system running at peak performance.

● Anti-virus. Virus Scanning Software are utility programs designed to protect your computer from
computer viruses, worms and trojan horses. Most anti-virus programs use one of the following
techniques to identify viruses:

1. Signature based detection: It compares the contents of the infected file to a known pattern of
data.
2. Heuristic-based detection: This method is primarily used to identify unknown viruses by looking
for malicious code or variations of such code. One of the techniques used is execution of the
suspected program in a virtual environment (sandbox) and analysing the actions any malicious
actions.

False positive is when antivirus software identifies a non-malicious file as a virus.

False negative is when antivirus identifies a malicious file as legitimate software.

• Backup utilities.Backup refers to making copies of data so that these additional copies may be
used to restore the original after a data loss event. A backup software could allow automated
scheduling of backup. Backup could be taken on variety of media including hard drive, CDs,
DVDs, floppy disks etc. It could also be taken on FTP locations, tape or online servers. A
number of free and proprietary back-up software are available including those from Microsoft,
Symantec, Apple, IBM, and Norton.
• Diagnostics and performance enhancement. A diagnostic program is a program written for the
purpose of locating problems with the software, hardware, or both, or a network of systems.
o Power-On Self Test (POST) : This isn't a separate diagnostic utility; it is in fact built into
your system BIOS and it runs every time you start up your PC automatically. It is often
the best indicator of system problems
o Device Manager : This is the most useful tool for identifying system configuration and
resource usage information
o Disk defragmenter. reorganizes non contiguous files into contiguous files and optimizes
their placement on the hard drive for increased reliability and performance
● file viewer. File view utilities let you see the contents of a wide variety of documents even when
you don't have the application on your system

Programming Software. Programming software usually provides tools to assist a programmer in

writing computer programs, and software using different programming languages in a more convenient
way.

● Text Editors. To write the code, e.g. notepad.

● Compilers and interpreters. programs that translate the code written in a high-level
programming language (called the source code) to the code in lower level language (the object
code, usually in machine language). Compiler performs this task for the entire program whereas
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instruction does the same thing line-by-line.

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● Assemblers. Translate assembly language program into machine level program.

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 ● Debuggers. used to test and debug other programs (the target program). offer functions such
as running a program step by step (single-stepping) or breaking (pausing the program to
examine the current state) at some event or specified instruction by means of a breakpoint, and
tracking the values of some variables
● Linker. For large softwares, modular approach is adopted in which the software is divided into
functional modules and separate source programs are written for each module. Each of these
source files can then be compiled independent of each other to create a corresponding object
file. Eventually, linker is used to combine all the object files and convert them into a final
executable program
● IDE. Integrated development environment, provides all the programs required for software
development (text editor, compiler/interpreter, debugger etc.) all in one place.

Malware. It is a type of software that is designed to secretly access a computer system, without the
owner‘s consent, and damage the system.

● Virus. A computer virus needs to attach itself to a document or program to infect other
computers or programs and requires action from user for execution.
● Worm. It has ability to self replicate. It actively spreads itself over the network, copies itself
from one disk drive to another or copies using email. It does not need user action to start.
● Trojan horse. When a program is disguised as something interesting and desirable, users are
tempted to download and install it on their machine, without knowing what it does. This is when
it does the damages by deleting files from the system or by further installing unwanted software.
This is the typical technique of Trojan horse. They make a computer susceptible to malicious
intruders by allowing them to access and read files
● Rootkit. This is a technique using which the malware remains concealed in the system, and
continues to do the damage in a concealed manner. Rootkits can prevent a malicious process
from being visible. Rootkits normally attempt to allow someone to gain control of a computer
system. These programs are usually installed by trojans and are generally disguised as
operating system files.
● Trap doors/ backdoors. This is a way of bypassing normal authentication procedure (windows/
operating system user name and password) to access a system. Once a system is
compromised (impacted by) by malware, one or more backdoors may be installed for easier
future access to the system.
● Bombs. Logic Bombs are not programs in their own right but rather camouflaged segments of
other programs. They are not considered viruses because they do not replicate. But their
objective is to destroy data on the computer once certain conditions have been met. Logic
bombs go undetected until launched, and the results can be destructive.
● Spyware. While so far we have discussed the malware‘s intent to damage the computer system,
spyware is designed for commercial gain. These programs gather information about the user
in a concealed manner, show pop-up advertisements, redirects the search engine results to
paid advertisements etc.
● Keyloggers. This is a program, once installed on the system, which intercepts the keys when
entering the password or the Credit Card number while shopping online.
● Ransomware. It locks the system by encrypting the files, thus denying access to the user. The
attacker demands ransom for decrypting the system, but payment doesn’t guarantee that you
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will regain access to the files. E.g. WannaCry.

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 It is best to keep backup and keep your system updated with latest security patches to protect
system against malware and ofcourse use a good anti-virus software and keep the safe search
on.

Homework: Try and look for recent examples of malware in news

Open Source Software. Open Source Software (OSS) is software that comes with source code, and
importantly also provides rights (typically reserved for copyright holders) to study, change and improve
the software. This development happens in a larger collaborative environment, without any direct
objective of the software‘s commercial success. Primary objectives of the Open Source movement are
as following:

● Encourage innovation at the grass-root level and facilitate collaborative software development
involving individual talent than it being the prerogative of the large companies.
● Reduce the software cost.
● Improve quality and security
● Avoid forced lock-in to vendor‘s proprietary software.

Open source software may or may not be available free of cost.

Freeware: Software is available for free available but the source code is not available.
Free and open source (FOSS): Software is both freeware and open source

Glossary

Client-Server: It is a computing architecture where servers are providers of a resource or service and
clients are the requester of resource or service. Clients and servers may reside in the same machine
or they typically reside in separate pieces of hardware and communicate over a computer network. A
server machine is a host that runs one or more server programs which share their resource with clients
and is required to be available at all times. Client doesn’t share any of its resources and initiates the
communication session with the server.
Control Panel. It is the part of Windows menu, accessible from the Start menu, which allows users to
view and manipulate basic system settings and controls, such as adding hardware, adding/removing8
software, controlling user accounts, changing accessibility options, etc.
Crawler. It is an Internet bot that systematically browse the world wide web, typically for the purpose
of Web indexing. It is also called a Web spider.
Cc/Bcc. Stands for "Carbon Copy." The term comes from carbon copying, in which a piece of carbon
paper copies writing from one paper to another (often used when filling out forms). However, the term
is now commonly used in reference to e-mail. When you send an e-mail message, you typically type
the recipient's address in the "To:" field. If you want to send the message to one or more other
recipients, you can use the "Cc:" field to add additional addresses. When you Cc an e-mail, all the
recipients can see the other addresses the message was sent to. If you want to hide the additional
addresses, use Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc) instead.
Clipboard. The clipboard is a section of RAM where your computer stores copied data. This can be a
selection of text, an image, a file, or other type of data. It is placed in the clipboard whenever you use
the "Cut”/”Copy" command, which is located in the Edit menu of most programs.Data from the clipboard
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can be pasted into a document or program using the "Paste" command, which is also located in most
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programs' Edit menu Cloud Computing: Cloud-based software services typically mean that the

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 consumer does not own the hardware and software, but still gets the desired service. It is an IT delivery
model that offers large-scale, shared infrastructure and computing resources as a service through self-
service pay-per use access. It must be Scalable, in order to accommodate increasing demand. Popular
variants of cloud services include, SaaS (Software as a service), PaaS (Platform as a service) and
IaaS (Infrastructure as a service).
Cookie. a cookie is data sent to your computer by a Web server that records your actions on a certain
Web site. It's a lot like a preference file for a typical computer program
CSS. Stands for "Cascading Style Sheet." Cascading style sheets are used to format the layout of Web
pages. CSS gives Web developers more exact control over how Web pages will look than HTML does.
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