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Case Study : Signed Applets Analysis

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Case Study: Signed Applets Analysis In the middle of 2005, Carlton Draught released an advertisement, called its "Big Ad." Visitors to the website www.bigad.com.au would be presented with a prompt from their browser about a signed Java applet that would then allow the visitor to view a video as it was streamed to their computers. The video was constructed in an "epic" style, meaning it looked very big, very expensive, and so very impressive. As such, after being online for only a day, the advertisement was viewed 162,000 times, and after two weeks the video had been viewed more than one million times, in at least 132 countries. An experiment, the subject of this case study, was conducted to assess the effect of human propagated malware that could be delivered from a website mirroring the Carlton Draught Big Ad site (Jakobsson & Ramzan).
User Risk In analyzing this case study, one question that is important to consider is what prompts users to open themselves up to the malware risks that can be offered by both the "Big Ad" and similar things. The way the researchers who ran the experiment initiated their goal of redirecting users was to create a mirror copy of the website at the address of www.bigad.com.au by downloading and assembling all of the files from the real website onto their own mirror site with a similar domain name of "verybigad.com," the circulating their fake websites name with the hope of word of mouth spreading it. The malware attack was simulated by

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