Blaster Revisited
What lessons can we learn from the carnage the Blaster worm created? The following tale is based upon actual circumstances from corporate enterprises that were faced with confronting and eradicating the Blaster worm, which hit in August 2003. The story provides views from many perspectives, illustrating the complexity and sophistication needed to combat new blended threats.
Network Forensics
The dictionary defines forensics as "the use of science and technology to investigate and establish facts in criminal or civil courts of law." I am more interested, however, in the usage common in the computer world: using evidence remaining after an attack on a computer to determine how the attack was carried out and what the attacker did.
Lack of Priority Queuing Considered Harmful
Most modern routers consist of several line cards that perform packet lookup and forwarding, all controlled by a control plane that acts as the brain of the router, performing essential tasks such as management functions, error reporting, control functions including route calculations, and adjacency maintenance. This control plane has many names; in this article it is the route processor, or RP. The route processor calculates the forwarding table and downloads it to the line cards using a control-plane bus. The line cards perform the actual packet lookup and forwarding.
Cybercrime:
An Epidemic
Painted in the broadest of strokes, cybercrime essentially is the leveraging of information systems and technology to commit larceny, extortion, identity theft, fraud, and, in some cases, corporate espionage. Who are the miscreants who commit these crimes, and what are their motivations? One might imagine they are not the same individuals committing crimes in the physical world. Bank robbers and scam artists garner a certain public notoriety after only a few occurrences of their crimes, yet cybercriminals largely remain invisible and unheralded. Based on sketchy news accounts and a few public arrests, such as Mafiaboy, accused of paralyzing Amazon, CNN, and other Web sites, the public may infer these miscreants are merely a subculture of teenagers.
Criminal Code:
The Making of a Cybercriminal
NOTE: This is a fictional account of malware creators and their experiences. Although the characters are made up, the techniques and events are patterned on real activities of many different groups developing malicious software.
Playing for Keeps
Inflection points come at you without warning and quickly recede out of reach. We may be nearing one now. If so, we are now about to play for keeps, and “we” doesn’t mean just us security geeks. If anything, it’s because we security geeks have not worked the necessary miracles already that an inflection point seems to be approaching at high velocity.
Security in the Browser
Web browsers leave users vulnerable to an ever-growing number of attacks. Can we make them secure while preserving their usability?
by Thomas Wadlow, Vlad Gorelik | March 16, 2009
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 52 Issue 5—
Cybercrime 2.0: When the Cloud Turns Dark
Web-based malware attacks are more insidious than ever. What can be done to stem the tide?
Browser Security:
Lessons from Google Chrome
Google Chrome developers focused on three key problems to shield the browser from attacks.
CTO Roundtable: Malware Defense
The battle is bigger than most of us realize.
CTO Roundtable: Malware Defense Overview
Key points from ACM's CTO Roundtable on malware defense
The Web Won't Be Safe or Secure until We Break It
Unless you've taken very particular precautions, assume every Web site you visit knows exactly who you are.
by Jeremiah Grossman | November 6, 2012
This article appears in print in Communications of the ACM, Volume 56 Issue 1—
Browser Security Case Study: Appearances Can Be Deceiving
A discussion with Jeremiah Grossman, Ben Livshits, Rebecca Bace, and George Neville-Neil
Splinternet Behind the Great Firewall of China
Once China opened its door to the world, it could not close it again.
