Angel or devil, good or bad, pros or cons .. everything has a positive as well as negative side. The first trace of this negative side appeared long before computers and for a totally different set of reasons. People who read about vandalism and hacking must be already aware of that story. How telephone system was first hacked to make free calls. Anyway I won’t dig into that story.
Today there are many facets to the dark side of IT. Life has goner far beyond viruses and worms and into many other forms of attacks, which are more dreadful.
Early 1970s-: Creeper virus appears
1974-: Rabbit virus detected
1982-: Elk Cloner virus on APPLEII appears This was the first large scale computer virus outbreak.
1986-: Brain boost boot sector virus
1988-: Morria worms exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities.
1995-: First macro virus appears, known as concept virus.
1999-: Melissa worm causes damage worth US dollar 4 million.
2000-: Loveletter worm damage 10 million dollars.
2001-: Sircam and code red in sep 2001, Nimda in October 2001.
2003-: SQL slammer worm
2004-: My Doom worm appears. It was regarded as the fastest spreading mass mailer till now. In may 2004 sasser worm.
2006-: First virus in Mac OSX, Known as OSX/ leep-A.
2007-: Strorm worm detected. It created storm botnet, comprising of 10 million computers.
Buffer Overflow Attacks-:The damage done by Morris worm were anywhere from dollar 10 million to 100M. Its creator Robert Tappan Morris, was a student of Cornell university and created this worm to gauge the size of the internet. It gave way to many other worms that utilized buffer overflow vulnerabilities in programs. two notable names caused maximum damage were code red and SQL slammer.
Brute Force Attack-:It was a method of decrypting a cryptrographic scheme by randomally trying large number of combinations till the scheme is broken. It includes dictionary attacks and is used to break passwords.
Botnets-:These are software bots spread across remotely controlled Zombie systems example storm botnet infected 1 crore machines. Attacks ranging from DOS, spamming, spyware, click frauds etc.
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A couple of years ago I experienced to have my computer slowed down by spyware and computer viruses to such a degree, where I had no other choice than to format the hard drive and totally re-install my OS and everything else. But that wasn’t everything. As soon as I powered up my desktop for the first time it was infected again! I concluded that there must have been a port/IP scanner somewhere that had recorded my IP adress and bombarded it with intrusion attempts. This was an older version of Windows, I am not sure how Vista or 7 tackles a situation like this, but obviously during the install my PC was unprotected exactly long enough to get re-infected. That was a REALLY bad day.