Next General Meeting:
Meeting Preview: Secure Computing—Jeff Setaro
Date: May 3, 2011
Location: Danbury Hospital Auditorium
24 Hospital Avenue, Danbury, CT, doors open at 6:30 p.m.

By Bruce Preston,

How many of you remember "The Good Old Days" of personal computing where it was just you, your computer, and the programs and data that you had on your floppy disks.  You were an island all to yourself and things worked well -mostly.  Once in a while you might be met with "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" when something went wrong and none of those choices were especially good.  But rarely did it cause a problem other than perhaps the loss of what you were doing at the time.

If you needed to copy something you just put a second diskette in the second drive and told the machine to copy.  And then things got a bit dark - unscrupulous people started copying expensive programs and selling or trading them.  So program publishers invented copy protection schemes that couldn’t be bypassed by typical users.  Then "crackers" (although the press referred to them as "hackers" and still does for the most part) broke copy protection and started distributing black market copies.  Eventually the black market copies were modified maliciously - often with code that would replicate and infect other floppy media - the birth of computer viruses.  It was only a matter of time before the anti-virus industry was born of necessity.

About the same time computers became participants in a network, be it a local area network or later the internet – first dial-up, and later broadband – and it became possible for viruses to enter the computer via means other than physical - first as downloaded executables, or macros in infected documents, and later delivered via infected e-mails and web pages.

The simplest definition of a virus is program code that replicates itself surreptitiously.  It may or may not include a "payload" – malicious code.  Anti-virus programs typically could detect them by looking for a "signature" - a unique series of instructions which identified the virus.  With hundreds of new viruses appearing per month, the signature files grew eventually requiring subscription to a service that provided signature updates on a daily basis.

Of course once a malicious person has access to a computer, financial gain becomes a motive.  This may be had by gaining access to personal information – account names, passwords – anything that supports identify theft.  The goal of the attack is no longer restricted to just installing a virus.  The general category of malware includes key logging to steal accounts and passwords, redirecting web browsing to steer spending to a “preferred site” or a site that harvests information, spambots to relay spam, or participate in a botnet set to perform denial of service attacks.

One way to combat the installation of malware is to introduce a firewall - a utility that controls access to a machine from the outside - essentially only allowing communications that the user has initiated.  Routers for cable or DSL connections frequently implemented a firewall in the hardware.  But the basic firewall in a router generally has to trust that anything that initiates on the user's end is legitimate.  Unfortunately this is not so.  If malware gets into a computer, the hardware firewall will let it establish a communications link to the outside.  So enter the "personal firewall" that runs on the client computer and monitors outbound connections as well.

Threats don't have to actually reside on your computer - fake e-mails or web pages solicit private information - phishing - trying to gather enough information sufficient to steal personal identity.  Phishing e-mails and web pages often look like official correspondence.

In summary the types of threats is ever increasing in parallel with the improvements in technology and thus the need for defensive techniques has also increased exponentially.  Come to the February DACS General Meeting to learn about the various threats as well as the ways to counter them.

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DACS meetings are held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. (Click here for directions.) Activities begin at 6:30 p.m. with registration and casual networking. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. with a question and answer period (Ask DACS), followed by announcements and a short break. The featured evening presentation begins at 8:00. The meeting is scheduled to adjourn at 9:30 p.m.

DACS General Meetings are free and open to the public. Members and prior attendees are encouraged to extend invitations to anyone interested in this topic.

Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS) is a registered nonprofit and has been serving the region since 1990. Members receive an award-winning newsletter, members-only workshops and events, and access to volunteer phone support.

 

 


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