Download Assignment #2 S.Popovic

Steven Popovic
03/02/10
Computer Science 316
Computer Host Security
1. Using the web, find out who Kevin Mitnick was. What did he do? Who caught him?
Write a short summary of his activities and why he is famous.
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Compromised the LA bus transfer system to get free bus rides.
Evading the FBI
Gaining full admin privileges to a IBM minicomputer at the computer learning
center in LA in order to win a bet.
Hacked Motorola, NEC, Nokia, and Sun Microsystems.
At the time of his arrest, Kevin was the most-wanted computer criminal in the
USA.
Was arrested by the FBI on February 15, 1995.
2. Consider the statement: an individual threat, like a hacker, can be represented in more
than one threat category. If a hacker hacks into a network, copies a few files, defaces the
Web page, and steals credit card numbers, how many different threat categories does this
attack cover?
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Harrassment for defacing a website.
Property damage for defacing the website.
Idenity theft if he uses the credit card numbers.
Trespassing onto a unautheroized network.
Riskware
3. Assume that a user has the chance to pick letters for passwords from a set of 82
different characters. Compute the average time that a brute force program takes to guess
a 9-character password. Assume that each trial needs four machine language instructions
and each instruction is executed in 35 nanoseconds. Ignore any other overhead.
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140 nanoseconds per each trial.
82^9 = 167,619,550,409,708,032 unique combinations.
82^9 * 140 = Amount of nanoseconds required to check all possible
combinations.
23,466,737,057,359,124,480 nanoseconds to check all possible combinations.
Divided by two to get the average which is 11,733,368,528,679,562,240 nsec.
11,733,368,529 sec = 195,556,142 min = 3,259,269 hours = 135,803 days
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanosecond
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick
http://www.f-secure.com/en_EMEA/security/security-lab/learn-more/threatcategories/