Cit 180 Security Fundamentals Ch 1 & 2

CIT 180 Security Fundamentals

1. Write a summary of the following according to your textbook:

a. Kevin Mitnick

b. David Smith of the Melissa virus

c. Conficker worm

1a. Kevin Mitnick was arrested in February 1995 on federal offenses from a 2 ½ year hacking spree that involved wire fraud, computer fraud, and illegally intercepting a wire communication. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 46 months in jail. In a plea agreement Mitnick admitted to several other crimes including unauthorized access to several computer systems belonging to several companies like Sun Microsystems, Fujitsu, Novell, and Motorola. He admitted to stealing e-mails and impersonating employees of targeted companies and using stolen accounts at the University of Southern California to store proprietary software he had stolen from various companies. He later became a cybercrime consultant and testified before Congress about social engineering and how real it was.

1b. David Smith graduated from Cornell University who created and released the first large scale internet attack known as the Internet (or Morris) worm. The worm infected roughly 10 percent of the machines that were connected to the internet and caused an estimated $100 million in damage. The worm didn’t do any real damage, but it did keep infecting known vulnerable computer systems until they couldn’t run any programs. He was convicted under Title 10 US Code Section 1030 and was sentenced to 3 years’ probation, $10,000 fine, and 400 hours of community service.

1c. The Conficker worm was believed to have originated in the Ukraine and was first detected in late 2008. The Conficker worm had security experts worried because millions of systems attached to the internet were infected with it. The infected systems could act as a bot network and be used as a secondary attack on the other systems or networks. The experts thought that the worm would activate on April 1, 2009 which would result in massive and...