Malware and Society

   
      In my last blog I discussed how big of an impact a virus or worm can have on society. The reality is quite sobering and hopefully shed some light on the necessity of being careful to whom and where you release personal information to. This blog will talk more about how someone would use malware to gain access to this kind of information. Hopefully by understanding the process, one might be able to prevent their personal information from falling into the wrong hands. Then I will also discuss more ways in which a simple virus can compromise a whole society.

    The first thing to understand is the distinction between Malware, viruses, worms, and etc. Malware is a general term that describes malicious software. This software is generally what will contain the actual virus itself. A virus will attach itself to an executable file so it can spread itself, whereas a worm replicates itself by sending copies of itself over a network. A Trojan horse is a term used to describe a certain kind of coding that will allow a virus to operate without detection under the guise that the actually software is supposed to be doing something else. Key logging application records keystrokes and sends them back to someone who can then decipher it and use it to gain access to whatever they were looking for. All of these tools are utilized by hackers today allowing them to gain access to massive amounts of data.

    In the last blog I discussed the PSN hack, while it is unclear how they actually got into the network, it is clear they utilized a system of physical and computer based means to accomplish this task. This allowed them access to the information of over 70 million users which are now at risk for phishing scams or similar kinds of issues. A nuclear facility also had a breach when a tainted USB device carrying an unknown virus infected the mainframe of one of their plants. While nothing extremely urgent was reported it did expose the flaws in their security protocols on these devices. If the virus had been used in such a way it would not be very difficult to infect the plants and cause a Chernobyl anywhere in the world. This again shows the dangers of our increasingly heavy reliance on computers, but yet at this crossroad it is also a necessity to do so.



Jonathan Alsop


Sources

http://thehackernews.com/2013/01/malware-infects-us-powers-through-usb.html#_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware#Infectious_malware:_viruses_and_worms