Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Internet if properly maximized can be used as a medium to the advantage of the company. However, risks and threats are there. Thus, research the following:
1. Identify the possible risks and threats (eg. virus) that can potentially attack a company with internet connection.
Although you’ve gathered a considerable amount of data to this point, you will need to analyze this information to determine the probability of a risk occurring, what is affected, and the costs involved with each risk. Assets will have different risks associated with them, and you will need to correlate different risks with each of the assets inventoried in a company. Some risks will impact all of the assets of a company, such as the risk of a massive fire destroying a building and everything in it, while in other cases; groups of assets will be affected by specific risks.
Assets of a company will generally have multiple risks associated with them. Equipment failure, theft, or misuse can affect hardware, while viruses, upgrade problems, or bugs in the code may affect software. By looking at the weight of importance associated with each asset, you should then prioritize which assets will be analyzed first, and then determine what risks are associated with each.
The option is to do nothing about the potential threat, and live with the consequences (if they occur). This happens more often than you’d expect, especially when you consider that security is a tradeoff. For every security measure put in place, it makes it more difficult to access resources and requires more steps for people to do their jobs. A company may have broadband Internet connectivity through a T1 line for employees working from computers inside the company, and live with the risk that they may download malicious programs. While this is only one possible situation where a company will live with a potential threat (and gamble that it stays “potential” only), it does show that in some situations, it is preferable to have the threat rather than to lose a particular service.
www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Risk_Assessment_and_Threat_Identification.html - 45k - 2. Case research and analysis:2.a Identify one company that had experienced an attacked from the internet.Global Crossing--Hannan's company
2.b Describe the attack.
While the biggest hacker attack in Web history loomed like a tsunami on the virtual horizon last Monday, Alan Hannan was looking for nothing more dangerous than soda and cookies in a San Jose, Calif., hotel lobby. Like hundreds of techies who help keep the backbone of the Internet properly aligned, Hannan had spent the morning at the North American Network Operators' Group conference listening to a talk on something called denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. "I thought I knew about them well enough," says Hannan. "I didn't pay much attention. I wish I had."
2.c Identify the damages done and the solutions adopted to reverse the damages and to protect the company from future threats.
Although neither man knew it yet, the Web's most popular portal was being bombarded with enough confusing information to cause the digital equivalent of a nervous breakdown. Normally, Yahoo absorbs a couple hundred million bits of data each second, meaning it can handle millions of Yahoo users asking simultaneously for, say, the lowdown on Ricky Martin without breaking much of a sweat. But now Yahoo's Internet service provider, Global Crossing--Hannan's company--was clogging up with as many as 1 billion bits a second.
But it was the type of information that did the most damage. This was no Ricky Martin request. It was millions of phantom users suddenly screaming "Yes, I heard you!"--which was very unusual since Yahoo hadn't said anything. Worse, the phantoms had all given Yahoo fake return addresses. Yahoo got so hung up trying to get back to them all, it couldn't get around to dishing up those Ricky links to regular users. Service, in other words, was denied. Visitors to Yahoo saw an empty screen.
Hannan and his team zipped back to Global Crossing's HQ. In an hour they figured out they were under a DOS attack. It took another couple hours of monitoring their $500,000 routing machines to figure out which one was being attacked and to install the kind of filters that would scare the phantoms away. It wasn't brain surgery. Kids make DOS attacks all the time. But when the engineers saw the size of the barrage--10 times as large as anything ever recorded--they gasped. "We all agreed," says Hannan, "that we had a very formidable opponent."
The next three days were marked by serial slowdowns at some of the biggest sites on the Web: Amazon.com, eBay, (owned by Time Warner, parent company of TIME), ZDNet, ETrade, Excite. Like so many virtual vandals before him, the phantom foe clearly craved attention. He got it in the shape of a front-page media frenzy, a full-scale FBI investigation and a hastily convened White House conference on Web hacking. And yet he stubbornly refused to show up at his own party, prompting PC paranoia and all manner of conspiracy theories.
So why do it if you're not going to brag about it? Some saw an economic motive or a Quixotic tilt at the commercialization of the Internet. After all, our phantom had managed to interrupt one of Wall Street's sacred rituals: the dotcom IPO of , which was hit by a DOS attack on Tuesday afternoon, before the end of its first day as a publicly traded company. The stock had reached a peak of $30.25, then closed at an unspectacular $25.12. Just when chief executive Gregory Hawkins should have been popping champagne corks, he was hunkering down in an emergency session with his techies. "I'm not going to kid you," says Hawkins. "My stomach did drop." That sinking-stock feeling spread the next day as the hack attack contributed to a market-wide sell-off.
Even more surprising than Wall Street's reaction was how much the hackers had done with so little. The kind of software used for the attack is practically public property. You can download it in the form of programs, or scripts, like Trin00, Tribal Flood Network or the nightmarish-sounding Stacheldraht (German for barbed wire). Each program can accept a kind of plug-in to make it even more adaptable, with names like Stream, Spank or Raped. "These tools have been out there for years," says Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of the hacker journal 2600. "Hackers have known about these for years. They haven't done anything about it. To me, that shows great respect and restraint."
It was hard to find a hacker last week who wasn't in full sneer about the so-called script kiddies--newcomers who would dare commit such ignoble attacks with prefab software. "A lot of us hackers feel insulted, because it's a no-brainer," says Val Koseroski, 32, a self-confessed "old-school" hacker with a wife, a child and a mortgage. "When I was growing up, hacking was about learning how a computer operates. You always tried to push it to the edge. Kids these days, they just want to do any damage they can."
But this was not mere vandalism either; too much planning had gone into it. Phase 1 took place as early as last year. The culprit first scanned the Internet for vulnerable networks to use as unwitting allies in the final attack. Small businesses and universities, where security is often more lax, are prime targets. Both Stanford and the University of California at Santa Barbara had been co-opted. A UCSB computer participated in the CNN website attack. Even the Navy's computers may have been enlisted as unwilling dupes.
www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,39177-1,00.html
