Essay on The Global Threat of Malicious Code

The purpose of this paper is to touch on the issue of Hacking. It will go into detail about the history, evolution, future and prevention of Hacking. In addition, this paper will discuss different types of hackers and their motivation behind hacking. This paper examines the major impact caused by malicious hackers and give modern examples of such attacks. To conclude, it will predict how hacking will be in the near future and give the precautionary measures Information Security professionals can take to mitigate the risk of being victimized.

Trojan’s are one threat it is a type of malware designed to provide unauthorized, remote access to a user’s computer. Trojan horses do not have the ability to replicate themselves like viruses; however, they can lead to viruses being installed on a machine since they allow the computer to be controlled by the Trojan creator.

Generally, the horse of Trojans is coded programs coded for the purpose of harming the computer devices which appears to be harm free, but when the code is executed by users, the data & file systems are corrupted leading to damaging the computer devices.

44. Which of the following type of program is also commonly referred to as a Trojan horse?

Over the past twenty years, the Internet’s role in our lives has grown to an everyday necessity. We rely on the Internet to communicate within the scope of our employment and social lives, to conduct our banking and bill paying, we even use it to track our personal property. There is hardly one area of our lives that we can not conduct over the Internet. While the Internet is a convenience that has made our lives easier, it has also opened the door in our lives to a vulnerability that is rapidly being exploited by cyber criminals. Cyber crimes are growing at an exponential rate in the United States and we, the consumers/end users are unaware of the liabilities a simple click on the wrong button can cause. This paper will

Social Engineering has become a career for modern day cyber criminals. Thieves are waiting to prey on the vulnerable, and naïve. The situations, as devastating as they are to the victims, are very real. In some cases, unfortunately, the cybercrimes are life-altering and irreparable. This paper will highlight four real-life cases where social engineering techniques were used to obtain personal and corporate information.

In this day and age, the threat of identity theft for the common individual has increased drastically. With advancements in technology and the ever growing power of the internet, identity thieves can rob personal information from unsuspecting victims quickly and easily. Identity theft, though existing before the creation of the internet, has morphed into a particular type of cyber crime. Perpetrators engage in social engineering fraud to access the personal data, passwords, or financial information. Criminals betray unknowing victims trust through email, social networking sites, but also use malware to access information, or hack into emails or computers. Techniques range from the recovery of data from insecurely disposed

Computer viruses are minute program which is “embedded inside an application or within a data file which can copy itself into another program“(Adams et al, 2008 ) for the sole determination of meddling with normal computer operations. The consequences may range from corruption and deletion of data; propagation of virus on to network and deployment through attachments through emails in order to further creating havoc to all associated computing devices.

Apple’s built-in defenses just aren’t enough to ward off the latest waves of malware, experts claim. So how do we protect ourselves now?

or Israel, that Israeli intelligence tested aspects of the worm using centrifuges identical to Iran's at Israel’s Dimona complex. Even Siemens the German company cooperated with Idaho National Laboratories in the US to identify the vulnerabilities of computer controllers that the company sells to operate industrial machinery around the world. Not too long afterwards, those very vulnerabilities were exploited by Stuxnet.

By the year of 2016, investments in online security are expected to reach $86bn (Contu et al, 2012). Although this might seem a large sum of money, it is considered necessary since there is an increase in online risks from all over the world. Professional hackers develop malware on a global scale and on a 24/7 basis. Hackers have five objectives when spreading malware over the Internet: to infect/distribute, to steal, to persist, to control and for intelligence (Morris, 2010).

Just like a biological virus, a computer virus is able to infect and ruin lives. This malicious software constitutes more than just simple viruses but also includes other types of software including worms, Trojan horses, and ransomware. Malware has been around since the late 1980’s. Originally, people became hackers to gain notoriety online, but today, it has become more of a business. Cyber attacks originate from all around the world, and it is not just individual people that benefit from it. In two decades, numerous cyber crime syndicates have been created, and states all over the world sponsor hacker groups. Over the past twenty-five years, malware has become less about checking the integrity of computer security and gaining notoriety in the underground cyber society, and it has become more of a chaos creating, money making business that many people and institutions take part in.

In the words of Frederick B. Cohen, computer virus as a" program that can infect other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of it ' ' [1]. Computer virus spreads from one computer to another by copying itself to an existing executable code. With the infection property, a virus can spread in a computer system or network using the authorizations of everybody, thereby affecting the user 's program. Every program that gets affected may also act as a virus.

There has been extensive work on detecting malicious mobile app. Literature cite{felt2011survey} gave a survey of mobile malware in the wild and analyzed the incentives behind 46 pieces of iOS, Android, and Symbian malware. Literature cite{amamra2012smartphone} classified malicious mobile app detection method based on 3 rules: reference behaviour, analysis approach and malware behaviour representation and divided smartphone malware detection techniques into two main classes: signature-based and anomaly-based. Literature cite{idika2007survey} examined 45 malware detection techniques which are instructive for malicious mobile app detection. In this section, we mainly focus on behavior-based malware

Unfortunately Hackers have realized the potential of using apps for spread-ing malware and spam. Networks Applications that present suitable means for hackers to spread malicious content on Face book on the other hand, little is understood concerning features of malicious applications and how they function. To build up rigorous application evaluator of face book we make use of information which is gathered by means of observation of posting behaviour of Face book apps which are seen across millions of face book users. In the recent times, hackers have considered popularity of the third-party application platform as well as deployment of malicious applications. Our aim is to build up a valid pplication evaluator of face book which is the first tool that is focused on detection of malicious applications on Face book. There are lots of malicious applications spreading on Face book each day. This is possibly initial comprehensive study that has focused on malicious Face book applications that focus on quantifying as well as understanding of malicious applications and make this information into an effectual detection method. For structuring of rigorous application evaluator of face book, we make use of data from a security application within