Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Different Kinds of Backdoor Access

As you can see in our definition, backdoors are focused on giving the attacker access to the target machine. This access could take many different forms, depending on the attacker's goals and the particular backdoor in use. Backdoors could give the attacker many different types of access, including the following:

• Local Escalation of Privilege: This type of backdoor lets attackers with an account on the system suddenly change their privilege level to root or administrator. With these superuser privileges, the attacker can reconfigure the box or access any files stored on it.

• Remote Execution of Individual Commands: Using this type of backdoor, an attacker can send a message to the target machine to execute a ...