Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Study Guide

Chapter 10. Trojans and Other Attacks

My early memories, forged in the stomping grounds of my childhood upbringing in LA (Lower Alabama), most often revolve around fishing, hunting, camping, or blowing stuff up. Back then, fireworks were a wee bit stronger than they are now, parental supervision wasn’t, and we were encouraged to get out of the house to amuse ourselves and spare our mothers a little bit of their sanity. And while my cousins and I certainly went through our fair share of gunpowder while running around my uncle’s property in Mount Vernon, Alabama, we found many other ways to bring about destruction and amusement in our little neck of the woods. In one of these memories, my cousin wound up nearly decimating an entire pond’s worth of fish with nothing but a bag and a shovel.

I’d heard one of my dad’s friends talking about how dangerous walnuts could be, as the hulls have loads of tannin and natural herbicides in them, which can be lethal to plants growing around the watershed of any walnut tree. It was definitely a cool and fun fact, but it didn’t do anything for me until I heard the last little nugget of the conversation: “Just don’t ever throw them in your pond. They’ll displace all the oxygen and kill all your fish.”

Armed with this knowledge, my cousin and I filled a big burlap sack full of walnut husks and dragged it out to one of the farm ponds to see whether it would work. We thought that simply chucking the bag into the pond wouldn’t be very effective, and ...