Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Luke Shiffner COSC 316 Chapter 3: Malicious code, Mobile Code and Denial of Service attacks This chapter will discuss malicious and mobile code along with the DoS attacks (Denial of Service). Malicious code is code designed specifically to harm the infected system. Mobile code is software obtained from remote systems, transferred across networks, and infecting the local machines without being asked for user input. And, finally, Denial of service attacks are attacks that exploit sending ping requests to a server and loop that action. That will flood the servers with traffic and use up network resources, sometimes deeming the website unusable for some period of time. First to be discussed is Malicious code. More commonly referred to as malware, this code can take on a variety of forms. The basic idea of malware is software that is designed with the purpose to cause harm and damages to the target system, this all happening without the owner’s consent. Malware started appearing back in the early days of the internet. “Many early infectious programs, including the first Internet Worm and a number of MS-DOS viruses, were written as experiments or pranks generally intended to be harmless or merely annoying rather than to cause serious damage to computers. Young programmers learning about viruses and the techniques used to write them wrote them only to prove that they could or to see how far it could spread. As late as 1999, widespread viruses such as the Melissa virus appear to have been written chiefly as pranks.” The next topic is Mobile code. This software is obtained thorough remote systems. It is then transferred across a network and then downloaded on to a user machine. This download and installation will usually happen without the user providing any input. Some examples of mobile code include javascript codes that are implemented in websites. Also there can be mobile code found in java applets, ActiveX controls and even Shock movies. Mobile code can also be executed in user machines through email. Such emails could contain Microsoft Office documents that have extensions of Macros or Javascript. These scripts or macros will run similar to the ILOVEYOU virus. In all these situations, the user is almost never aware of the infection, and is why they become a major problem. The last topic to be discussed in this chapter is DoS attacks. DoS attacks or Denial of Service attacks are dedicated attacks that aim to take down a resource that has constant users. These resources can range from websites to dedicated servers. The idea behind these attacks is to loop an attack that will ultimately use up so much of the network resources, and will cause the server to eventually crash. While there are many derivatives of this type of attack there is one that is a major threat. It is called DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack. These attacks take advantage of strength in numbers. They use multiple infected machines to send requests to servers simultaneously. This increases the speed and strength of these attacks a lot.