The Threat Environment Hacking And Preventing Attacks Information Technology Essay

In today the internet and Web technologies have been highly honored. Perhaps there still seems to be a dark side of the internet world that has emerged and bedeviled this technological era. This importantly involves spam, malware, hacking, phishing, attacks, click fraud and so on and so forth. The responses to these effects of the internet have included technologies and various legislation, public awareness efforts etc. Thus in this report we intend to discover the major threat of environment, the taxonomies of the major causes and costs involved in attacks and their responses to it. We would as well try to discover the possible prevention methods of these attacks.

INTRODUCTION

In this era internet and web technologies have transformed the world completely. The world of internet has three basic concept that is compared to human life: the good, bad and ugly. The good in the world of internet are all of the benefits of the internet and the maximum use of it in people’s life. The bad associated with technology is damage to a business or institution and others using it. These includes spam, viruses, hacking and others that majorly damage the computer and corrupt all the files and documents stored in the systems. The worst that is ugly is considered to be something that is outside the box of law, privacy violation and things linked to online behavior. It should be observed that much of things associated with dark side of the internet and technology are all illegal and unethical. The dark side must be dealt with appropriately so that the world can change for good. The only to prevent the online systems is to be much more careful about contents received and make it tolerable as this cannot be avoided completely. This prevention methods can be bifurcated into two parts one being technology-centric and the other being non-technology centric. These non-technologic centric is related to rules, regulation, legislation, civic action and etc. It has been observed that not much research has been done considering the dark side of technology and the security systems.

Understanding hacking is refers mainly to break into others computers. It seems to be very simple to be used but once our computer has been hacked our life becomes difficult as our privacy gets violated. The technology has grown to an extend were people can now very easily break into our computer or systems without any physical access or opportunity given to them to the target computer. The people involved in hacking are called as hackers and there are few hackers who just hack as it being their hobby or to show off their skills in relation to technology. There are few hackers who hack in order to gain access to sensitive data’s and eventually destroy them causing major loss for the company or business.

Objectives

The main objective of this report is to understand hacking and other environmental threats and attacks. Though we would not be able to cover all of the threats and attacks perhaps would roughly generalize on different threats.

The report would also summarize on possible prevention methods of hacking and what are the ways in which an hacker could hack our computer systems and what are the reasons for such un-safety.

Literature Review

Information is the major key asset for an organization; hackers generally try and hack the information either by using the intellectual property rights. This one is the most sought after type of data for attackers who use techniques linked to advanced persistent threat. Secondly they try and run after corporate secrets; this could be associated to either infrastructure design or any plans or acquisition data’s thirdly the most interesting data for hackers are related to financial documents; these are the ones that are generally protected unpublished data which could cost an organization a lot when disclosed. Then it could be health care details; record involving high-profile and celebrity patients which are supposedly private and confidential. Then are the legal documents; this could be any case related documents that is not available outside that particular organization. Lastly the hackers could run after competitive information’s that are of interest especially those of deal negotiation details and estimated quotes for a deal. It comes as a surprise to common man when he realizes the information’s after which the hackers are after. Hackers are highly intellectual and generally masters considering the technical knowledge. It is said that prevention of hacking is not completely possible though it is not impossible.

Prevention of Threats

It is understood that there are two ways of successful attacks one of which is delivery of malware and the other one is hidden execution of malware. These are generally the attacks that we have covered, but it is as well important for us to understand how hacking is done.

As stated earlier it is impossible to prevent hacking but definitely can try to our level best to maintain privacy. It is ideally important to monitor threat quite frequently and analyze the risk. This is one such way of preventing -environmental attacks.

Secondly enhancement of security awareness must be created and updated. This also includes website protection, monitoring of threat and as well as application for security testing. These would help prevent the delivery of attacks and be more cautious towards protecting data’s.

Lastly one of the effective method found is to be host and network anomaly detection, as well as a program of incident response.

How is hacking done?

This question arises in every individuals mind. How is hacking done. As said previously people who hack are highly intellectual in technical background. They often work towards weak authentication or defects in famous software’s in order to break into computer systems. The software’s include windows operating systems, SQL based database systems and others. They also master in methods like cracking passwords, phishing and malware in order to hunt for the password.

Weak authentication is one of greatest advantage for an hacker as it allows you to unlimitedly log in unlike the ones that does not allow us to attempt more than three times. Secondly the other advantage for hackers seems to be short passwords. This allows the hackers to easily guess the username and passwords to break into computer systems.

Every systems must allow us to change passwords periodically just to be a little more cautious. Systems with encryptions of password that are weak are vulnerable to pre-computation attacks. The other reason for easy hacking is identification of software defects. This reason is considered to be the major loop hole of un-security. The various types of exploitation of hacking methods are firstly to explore memory safety violation. This has been there from decades and has yet been difficult to get rid of this type of hacking. This one is to attack the memory safety that includes buffer overflows and other invalid pointer references.

Second one is to inject codes: which is the most common method of attacking any web server. This can be done from outside on the any target computer. This includes several methods like cross-site scripting and SQL injection method.

Thirdly is the cross-site requesting for forgery. In this the victim presumes that the website is trustworthy and leaks out information. This generally happens via e-mail, were victims receive spam mails to click on a particular link that they have sent which becomes easy for the hacker to hack our system.

Prevention of Hacking

This is very difficult if not completely impossible. At times it so happens that there is no possible chance of anyone detecting hacking. As everyone knows it very difficult for someone to actually think of a password that is very difficult to guess. Secondly it is not nearly impossible for anyone to not write down his/ her password on a piece of paper and as well as prominently post it. Thirdly it is observed to be impossible to create a complex software without any flaws, the best way to prevent such flaws right from designing, coding, testing and etc. Techniques have been developed to reduce the damage that is caused by hacking. One of way to defend against buffer overflow attacks has been found out as canaries technique which mean the value that is known and inserted deliberately in order to find out the buffer overflows. The other method that is to talk about is known as the code injection technique that includes input filtering and as well output escaping. There are also newly designed tools which are used to detect vulnerabilities in software’s so that these developers can also analyze and remove them before even they are identified by the hackers. All of these methods can only to a certain extend help find and prevent hackers to break in by monitoring network and other system activities which raise alarms if there any kind of suspicious activity. The intrusion methods also include signature-based detection and other method called as the anomaly-based detection.

For the attacks the attackers exploit session establishment requests wherein the attacker sends a large number of requests to the systems that they are targeting which makes the system too busy to serve certain requests from legitimate users. The main target of the denial of service attacks is not only limited to end the systems. These also include the information of network routers, switch and other domain name servers.

To talk about various attacks there are several environmental threats that include mail bomb attack, these are attacks that we receive via e-mails, then there is peer-to peer attack wherein an outside computer called the zombie computer is used to send large information requests to the targeted computers. Thirdly are the variable-rate and low-rate attacks, this particular attack are a little difficult if required to trace the attacker.

Preventive measure for all of these attacks is all different from each other. It could be done by filtering methods or securing the IP addresses or detecting attacks by regularly monitoring the systems and detecting threats. Phishing is also one of the method which could lead to attacking our system.

The other most common violation has been for the digital property rights as well due to file sharing or downloading copyrighted digital properties without any authorization. There has to be a lot of research yet to be done into prevention methods of these attacks and hacking.

Conclusion

Currently, government should be prepared for all type of threats and hacking. Technology alone cannot be responsible for the dark side. There are lack of response to the dark side of the online world. Every individual should guard to reduce the damage that is occurred due to the dark side. There must be secured IP addresses created for every single web site used and computer systems must be protected with strong password that cannot be guessed by anyone. Yet there has to be further research in this era of technology considering environmental threats, attacks and hacking.