Viruses over internet

Creating and distributing viruses over internet

Spreading of a virus can cause business and financial loss to an organization. The loss includes the cost of repairing the system, cost associated with the loss of business during downtime and cost of loss of opportunity. If the organization finds the hacker, it can sue him for the sum of more than or equivalent to the loss borne by the organization.

Spamming

Sending of unsolicited and commercial bulk message over the internet is known as spamming. An email can be classified as spam, if it follows these three criteria:

• Mass mailing: - the email is not targeted to one particular person but to a large number of peoples.

• Anonymity: - The real identify of the person not known

• Unsolicited: - the email is neither expected nor requested for the recipient. These spams not only irritate the recipients and overload the network but also waste the time and occupy the valuable memory space of the mailbox.

Cross Site Scripting

It is an activity which involves injecting a malicious client-side script into a trusted website. As soon as the browser executes the malicious script, it gets access to the cookies and other sensitive information and sent them to remote servers. Now this information can be used to gain financial benefit or physical access to a system for personal interest.

Online Auction Fraud

There are many genuine websites who offers online auctions over internet. Taking the advantage of the reputation of these websites, some of the cyber criminals lure the customers to online auction fraud schemes which often lead to either overpayment of the product or the item is never delivered once the payment is made.

Cyber Squatting

It is an act of reserving the domain names of someone else’s trademark with intent to sell it afterwards to the organization who is the owner of the trademark at a higher price.

Logic Bombs

These are malicious code inserted into legitimate software. The malicious action is triggered by some specific condition. If the conditions holds true in future, the malicious action begins and based on the action defined in the malicious code, they either destroy the information stored in the system or make system unusable.

Web Jacking / Defacement

The hacker gain access to a website of an organization and either blocks it or modifies it to serve political, economical or social interest. The recent examples of web jacking are some of the websites of the educational institutes were hacked by Pakistani hackers and an animation which contains Pakistani flags were flashed in the homepage of these websites. Another example is Indian hackers who hacked the website of Pakistani railways and flashed Indian flag in the homepage for several hours on the occasion of Independence Day of India in 2014.

Internet Time Thefts

Hacking the username and password of ISP of an individual and surfing the internet at his cost is Internet Time Theft.

Denial of Service Attack

It is a cyber attack in which the network is chocked and often collapsed by flooding it with useless traffic and thus preventing the legitimate network traffic.

Salami Attack

It is an attack which proceeds with small increments and final add up to lead to a major attack. The increments are so small that they remain unnoticed. An example of salami attack is gaining access to online banking of an individual and withdrawing amount in such a small amounts that it remains unnoticed by the owner. Often there is default trigger set in the banking website and transactions below say, Rs. 1000 withdrawal are not reported to the owner of the account. Withdrawing amount of Rs. 1000 over a period of time will lead to total withdrawal of a large sum.

Data Diddling

Data Diddling It is a practice of changing data before its entry into the computer system. Often, the original data is retained after the execution on the data is done. For example, DA or the basic salary of the person is changed in the payroll data of an individual for pay calculation. Once the salary is calculated and transferred to his account, the total salary is replaced by his actual salary in the report. Data Diddling is unauthorised altering of data before or during entry into a computer system, and then changing it back after processing is done. Using this technique, the attacker may modify the expected output and is difficult to track. In other words, the original information to be entered is changed, either by a person typing in the data, a virus that’s programmed to change the data, the programmer of the database or application, or anyone else involved in the process of creating, recording, encoding, examining, checking, converting or transmitting data. This is one of the simplest methods of committing a computer-related crime, because even a computer amateur can do it. Despite this being an effortless task, it can have detrimental effects. For example, a person responsible for accounting may change data about themselves or a friend or relative showing that they’re paid in full. By altering or failing to enter the information, they’re able to steal from the enterprise. Other examples include forging or counterfeiting documents and exchanging valid computer tapes or cards with prepared replacements. Electricity boards in India have been victims of data diddling by computer criminals when private parties were computerizing their systems.

Email Spoofing

It is a process of changing the header information of an e-mail so that its original source is not identified and it appears to an individual at the receiving end that the email has been originated from source other than the original source.