Fundamentals of Communications and Networking, 3rd Edition

Impact on Security

As applications have migrated toward more distributed components, the opportunities for attackers to compromise one or more components and impact the overall application have increased. Attackers have many motivations, including notoriety, revenge, political reasons, or profit. Attackers routinely search for application vulnerabilities to find threats that would allow them to reach their goals. Although numerous Application Layer threats exist, listing all of them would take pages and pages, and there would likely be omissions. Here are some of the more common Application Layer threats:

• Malicious software (malware)—Software developed for the purpose of doing harm. Examples of malware include the following:
  • Trojan horse ...