On Security - John George

This week I learned more about malware.  I was already familiar with the general concept, of computer programs that are used for mal icious purposes, hence the name.   I was not surprised to see it confirmed that C and C++ are common programming languages for malware, as performance and portability are important for malware, as is relative ease of creation, all of which are qualities of C and C++, as I know from my time studying at NIU.  An example of a somewhat famous piece of malware that was not a virus but widely considered a trojan piece of spyware/adware is BonziBuddy. BonziBuddy was a virtual assistant program that ran on Windows, however, it would surreptitiously send some information to servers belonging to the company owned by its creators, and also change your homepage.  ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy ) The circumstances under which I would consider software to be malware depend upon intent.  For example, a Remote Administration Toolkit ...

One thing I learned from this week's lessons that I had not already heard of is that there is such a thing as a denial-of-sleep attack. This is when a sensor network that has a power-conserving sleep mode is constantly bombarded with traffic to keep it awake and prematurely run down the chemical power sources keeping the sensors powered, thus disabling the network until they are replaced.  I also learned about the CIA of Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability.  Although I was already aware of the concepts involved of keeping data private, intact, and accessible, now I have learned of a new way to refer to these concepts that I wasn't previously aware of.  I also had forgotten that the difference between a computer worm and a virus is that a worm is fully self-propagating, whereas a virus depends upon an e-mail program to transfer copies of itself to additional host computers.  I was already familiar with the fact that trojans are programs that contain malware ma...