Debbie Reategui Siles
Kelly Shaw
Dr. Gorrell P. Cheek
10 April 2014
Survey and Analysis of Recent and Emerging Malware
Our world and its infrastructures have become largely dependent on information technology solutions and computer networks. The criminals or “cybercrooks” behind the malware attacks are looking to retrieve information from users for their gain. This is bad news seeing as it can put many companies and users personal information at risk. There have been many articles created in response to the CryptoLocker virus. A recent article suggests that CryptoLocker has opened doors to many more instances of ransomware. PoS (Point of Sales) attacks is the act of gathering important user data from PoS machines, these are ATMs and credit card readers used in all different types of places. OpenSSL is the most commonly used encryption software used on the Internet, big online companies use this software. Malware evolves through time capitalizing on new approaches and exploiting the flaws in the emerging technologies to avoid detection.
Introduction and Background
Cyber attacks are becoming more and more popular lately as they are cheap, convenient and less risky than physical attacks. All it takes is a computer, internet connection, and time. These “Cybercrooks” are hard to find seeing as they can be anywhere in the world and the anonymity of the Internet makes them unreachable. Vulnerable components in IT Infrastructure are the software, hardware, and network. In order for any type of malware to work it needs to get through all these walls (Jang-Jaccard).
To get through these security walls “cybercrooks” are creating more and more different types of malware. What is malware? Microsoft defines it as the following “Malware is sho...
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...rovided the necessary information about the vulnerability and how they are working to prevent the issue from recurring. Just like all of the other papers that have been about this type of malware, they all agree on a few simple solutions to stop the majority of these vulnerabilities. A few examples would be: keeping your firewall, antivirus software, and operating system always updated with the latest patches. Most of the patches released are to keep prevent vulnerabilities from occurring. Unfortunately, this issue could not be prevented by the end user because it was a flaw in the implementation of the software from OpenSSL. Even the users that covered all precautions, could have been attacking by this bug. The article also provided the solution to the vulnerability which had the websites update OpenSSL and to administer the end users’ new keys.
Conclusion
Discovery of this virus divided scientist in two groups; the ones in favor of publication the virus and the ones are against the publication. According to Fouchier in the article “The Deadliest Virus” by Micheal Green, he says that if more people have access to it, it
Cyber security is the designing, creating, using, and repairing most technological and mechanical equipment. This includes programing and creating new technology before it is mass produced in order to insure safety and quality. It also cover the use of programs to protect and fix technological and mechanical equipment from malfunctions, viruses, and hackers. Lastly, cyber security includes the repairing and upkeep of most electronically designed systems. This job is important because most of today’s world is entirely made up of system that need to be protected, maintained, and constantly improved. This jobs needed in order to keep developed countries stable and able to keep developing,
Multi-platform computer worms are a tool that computer hackers use to infect computers to gain control access. Computer worms are a dangerous virus because they are self-replicating, meaning that they multiply themselves and spread onto other computer networks seeking a lapse in internet security. Computer worms do not need to attach themselves onto an existing computer program to gain access to the victim computer files. The computer worm was created on accident by a Cornell student named Robert Morris; he was seeking a way of managing the internet in 1988. “Morris had no malicious intent, but a bug in his program caused many of the computers the worm landed on to crash. … but worms had come of age and have since evolved into an effective way of attacking systems connected to the internet” (Barwise). Today, hackers use the Morris worm to infect computers. “Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia …” (Richmond). Since the good intended creation of the worm it has only been used maliciously as a computer virus by money seeking computer hackers such as the Koobface gang in Russia.
During the beginning of this month, a Ransomware known as WannaCry hit almost 200,000 computers in more than 150 countries across the globe. I believe this was one of the worst Cyberware attacks in the recent times. It would be apt to say that this global Cyberware attack recently was rather unprecedented. How did it happen?
The history of cybercrime goes back to 1971 and the first computer virus called the Creeper which was created by Bob H. Thomas, who was a BBN engineer (Dalakov, Meltzer, and Phillips). BBN which stands for Bolt, Beranek and Newman, is now Raytheon BBN Technologies (“About”, Dalakov). A computer virus is a program that is created to cause damage to a computer or perform other malicious acts (204). The Creeper virus was designed to infect the ARPANET network. The ARPANET, which stands for Advance Research Projects Agency was set up by the U.S. Government as an agency in 1969 to provide a network of computers that would connect various academic and research organizations; it was the predecessor of the Internet (“Internet”, Morley, and Parker).
Having first appeared in Russia in 2005, referred as Winlock, that successfully scammed over £10m from unsuspecting victims before the Russian authorities arrested 10 individuals for involvement in such hackings in 2010, however it hasn’t stop the growing number of the problem. With such profitable money to obtain, perpetrators have discovered new ways to spread the malware and to cash-in at the expense of victims.
Computers are main technological features that allow criminals to step into unsuspecting victims lives. With a simple piggy-backing program hackers are able to track every keystroke made by the victim. One such program is called spyware, not to be confused with adware, which is often referred to interchangeably with spyware, but is potentially harmless (Louis 15). Spyware, hidden within downloaded software, implants itself deep within a computer’s hard drive, allowing it to track every move made by the user (Louis 16). Once inside a system, spyware can gather e-mail addresses, passwords, and credit card numbers.
...art deals with maintaining a list of rules that would detect any suspicious behavior of the app by maintaining known signatures. The second part would include a utility such as snort provided as open source with Ubuntu 12.04 release that can monitor the network interfaces. The rules created earlier also contain known safe signatures to avoid false positives.
In today’s society technology is used for everything. With the invention of computers and the internet this open doors to the cyber world. Today you can do almost anything without having to leave your home. The internet gives us the opportunity of shopping online, ordering food online, working from home and video chatting with friends and family across the world. Everyone has a computer and internet access in their homes. While the internet is really convenient it also opens doors for cybercrimes, loss of privacy and the need for computer security.
In this globalized arena, with the proliferating computer users as well as computer networks, risks associated like Malware attacks are also multiplying. As the proverb
We have grown accustomed to having the Internet at our fingertips no matter where we go. It is impressive that with less than 10 clicks we could talk, make a transaction or finish a business deal. As with anything, there are always ups and downs. The Internet is extremely useful and without it people and businesses would not be able to function properly; but along with those benefits comes a real danger, and that danger is Cybercrime. Cybercrime put simply is any crime committed on the Internet, whether it is downloading music illegally to cyber-terrorism. In today’s modern era, cyber crime is almost unavoidable, it is essential to prepare yourself and learn as much as you can in order to protect your assets. The Internet is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil but is up to you to choose.
The problem this paper will endeavor to address is that of cyber security or the lack of it, characterized by the cybernation of our lives, which has increased our vulnerability to cyber-attacks. The scope of the threat posed by cyber insecurity will be addressed. How severe is threat posed by cyber criminals? How do they operate? The ramifications of cybercrimes and their impact on the economy are without a doubt cause for government. In addressing the problem, however, the government faces the dilemma of acce...
Malicious code is a real danger to modern systems. Most systems nowadays do not work in isolation; they are more likely to be connected to other systems and sometimes they can even be dependent on them. Therefore an attack on one of the systems in the network is a potential attacking attempt to any other systems, with which it is interacting. Therefore, it is inevitable for any networked or Internet-connected computers to deal with malicious code attacks at some point. Businesses lose billions of dollars each year because of malicious code attacks. Responding to the attack and restoring all the data on the computers is a time-consuming and expensive task. It is a much better practice to try preventing it through organizing and maintaining effective defenses. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is no one general solution that can help to prevent all the attacks. Attackers are constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of systems’ vulnerabilities and find new ones. That’s why organizations have to not only defend themselves against existing attack methods, but also try to predict and prevent new attacking techniques. It means that computer and network security is a never-ending challenge and expense.
Cybercrime refers to all forms of crime conducted through a computer or a mobile device using computer networks. It is thus the use of a computer with the aim of intercepting and manipulating content, disrupting communication, stealing or generally destroying others’ information or hardware through a network. Although cybercrime is a worldwide problem and affects both small and big companies, small companies are affected more from the dangers of cybercrime. The rapid advancement in technology is causing tremendous problems to businesses in terms of more sophisticated cyber-attacks. This project is interesting and beneficial because it enlightens one on the dangers of cybercrime, thus preparing individuals to know how to prevent attacks while online, how to reduce the effects of a cyber-attack and how to prevent future
While the impact of globalization has led to amazing, new discoveries throughout the world, Internet connectivity has also made cybercrime easier. America and the rest of the world have become more reliant on technology and use it in more aspects of their lives, technology users make themselves more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Globalization and the growing use of computers in the world have given people a motive to learn more about computing and become more knowledgeable as programmers. As these people learn more, there is a risk that they will use their new intelligence to commit cybercrimes. The internet offers high-speed connectivity between countries, which allows criminals to commit cybercrimes from anywhere in the world.