Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Summary

Observing the mistakes of others is a low-pain, high-gain way to learn about information security. In this chapter, we explored three different scenarios involving malware attacks against various-sized networks. In each scenario, a series of common errors led to complete compromise of a target network.

In Scenario 1, the victim was surfing the Internet from a critical infrastructure system. Compounding the problem, the victim hadn't recently patched the Web browser on the machine and was even surfing the Internet while logged in as an administrator for the machine. Together, these three problems (surfing from a critical system, using an unpatched browser, and logging in as administrator) allowed an attacker to send malicious mobile code ...