|
Best Security Software.com |
|
|||
History of Internet SecurityThe Story Behind The Great Internet Sabotage
History of Internet Security:
Birth of the Internet
Then, in 1989, ARPANET was changed to Internet. Thank God because I'm tired of typing in all caps. Of course, I skipped a lot of stuff but hey, do you want interesting or encyclopedia? By now there were about 100,000 computers on the Internet. I realize that's a difficult number to grasp. Maybe I should go through one of those, "If you placed 100,000 computers end to end...." examples. Or, maybe not. The point is, the Net was really getting big. So, originally, the Internet was designed to share research, but now lots of other stuff was happening and the usage began changing. With all this activity, the Net was ripe for criminal minds and just plain jerks.
History of Internet Security:
Poly
What?
Boot sector viruses were simple, annoying and sometimes damaging. But they were easily killed too. This led to invisibility techniques to hide them. And that led to polymorphic viruses. Now were getting somewhere. PMVs (that's what I'm calling them so I sound creative and thousands of security experts will quote me and I'll become rich and famous, or not) do something really sneaky. They are chameleons. Viruses are just computer programs. They are written in "computer code" that might look like this: ...This is just a few lines of a real virus but there's a section somewhere in this code whose sole purpose is to rewrite many or all of the lines so that they look different but do exactly the same thing. In computer code there are many ways to do this. At first antivirus software in the history of Internet security used "signatures" to locate programs like this. Once a virus was found, a programmer wrote a little program of his own that would recognize parts of the virus code. Then, when you ran a scan on your computer, it would find this code based on the signature and delete it or do some other process to neutralize it. But since PMVs rewrite themselves each time they are are replicated, antivirus software can get confused because it looks different than it did before. New detection techniques would later try to solve this problem. The first PMV was written by Mark Washburn in the year of our Lord 1260 and was called 1989. Um, no, that's wrong. It was written in 1989 and called 1260. Curse those numbered viruses. 1260 was an encrypted virus. In other words, it applied a different secret code to itself each time it replicated. This made it harder for virus scanners to use the signature method since they looked different each time. In the next few years, these polymorphic viruses had variations that got smarter. "Stealth viruses" would hide in memory, making them hard to find. Others in the history of Internet security would completely rewrite themselves every time they replicated so that the entire program looked different. Even worse, the virus author would rewrite the whole thing by hand every time he/she released a new variant. Yes, they released them more than once under lots of different names making it confusing and hard to track. This type of PMV is why signatures stopped working altogether and a new way had to be found to discover them. signatures are still used, however, and still work on older viruses. Incidentally, viruses at first were written to sabotage computers for a number of reasons but there was no monetary incentive to do so. Later, as we'll see, some virus authors would discover that their little gremlins could make them money! For example, very sophisticated custom viruses are designed for a specific purpose. They are sent to a specific person working for a specific company in order to trick them into gaining access to internal computer networks. From there, they can implement a scheme to steal from the company or sabotage networks. Notice the progression here: Viruses moved from being a nuisance to causing damage to making money. Just like the US government.
|
Security Tip Of The Week
If you'd like |
|||
|
Sign up for |
||||
|
.
Home |
Return from History of Internet Security Part 3 to Internet Security Information
Return to top |
||||
|
|
||||