NET-180 Week 1: Chapters 1-3

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 masquerading as legitimate software.  I was already familiar with buffer overflows from my experience at NIU as a Computer Science Major.  One thing worth noting for those using Windows is that Windows Defender has been included with the operating system since Windows 7 (although initially it was just the anti-spyware component, but it was later combined with the Anti-Malware program Microsoft Security Essentials under the Windows Defender name, see Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Defender), and is actually a decent anti-malware program, and also isn't very vulnerable to infection unlike some, such as older versions of Norton.

Some useful websites are http://virustotal.com which allows links and files to be scanned against pretty much every anti-malware program available, and Web of Trust at http://mywot.com, which allows users to rate websites on how trustworthy they are.