Cyber Security: Other Forms of Attack

‘Adware’, that forces users to view advertising, and ‘Spyware’, malware that attempts to access personal information and user passwords.

Autorun worms take advantage of the Windows AutoRun feature. They execute automatically when the device on which they are stored is plugged into a computer. Autorun worms are commonly distributed on USB drives, automatically infecting computers as soon as the USB is plugged in. AutoPlay is a similar technology to AutoRun.

“Rabbit” programs
These are programs for mainframe computers. If no jobs are waiting, these programs add a copy of themselves to the end of the queue.

Rootkit- While it might be easy to detect a background process by opening the task manager, the Rootkit tends to hide those processes in such a way that we dnt even get to know that such a process is already running.

Buffer Overflow attack - attacker sends excess data to a program , causing it to overwrite parts of the computer's memory that the operating system was using , thus providing opportunity for unauthorised/malicious code to execute itself or crash the system

The Botnet - A group of many computers that have been infected and now act together as part of a command and controlled server. The group of computers or botnet, can be used to spam emails, or assist in Distributed Denial of Service attacks. This is where you send many requests to a particular web site to try and stop the site from actually getting legitimate business traffic on the internet.

Zombie: A zombie system is one that is compromised, and that can be remotely prompted to do the bidding of its master (rather than its owner). This could mean scouring the internet for other vulnerable systems to contaminate and add to the collective/horde, known as a botnet. Botnet time can be sold like a mercenary service on the black-market: mass spamming, adware/fake products aimed at owners of zombie systems, the ever popular DDoS attacks that you only see widely reported when a mega popular service is downed. I'm sure there are some properly nasty organised criminal types with a finger in this pie these days.

Boot sector malware: when the computer is first switched on, the boot sector program initialises and loads the rest of the operating system into memory. The malware replaces the original boot sector program and loads its modified version when the computer is switched on, probably to ensure that the malware is easily viable

A 'drive by download' is when software (malware) is automatically downloaded without the user being aware of initiating the download. This can happen when you visit a site (including legitimate sites) that have been attacked and compromised; the malware exploits vulnerabilities in the browser (or plugins).