Malware, Botnets and DDoS. Attacks on bank information security and personal users.

Introduction

Description of DDoS Attacks, malwarwe and Botnets

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one of main threats to Internet security. Due to the spatio-temporal properties of the attack, it is possible to detect the attack at its early stage. In this paper, we propose a novel method of DDoS threat assessment based on network vulnerability analysis. Both the multi-phase character in the temporal dimension and the impacts in the spatial dimension are concerned in our method. We use three metrics to assess threat, namely the ratio of progress, botnet size, and bots distribution. Experimental results show that our method is sensitive to the changes of attack states, and is easy to be implemented in an early warning system because of its simplicity. As malware becomes pervasive and fast-evolving on the Internet, every computer in banks linking to the outer world faces the risks of malware attacks. Therefore, it is important for banks to not only detect malware as early as possible but also to determine which computer has been attacked. Among the various methods to find and trace the existence of malware, retrospective detection is promising one. Once a threat is identified, it allows one to determine exactly which host or users open similar files by searching historical information. In the past, the huge volume of historical information represents an insurmountable barrier to such traces. Fortunately, with the evolution of cloud computing technologies, this barrier can be broken.

History of Security Threat

In the past decades, there has been a rapid development of the Internet. Various kinds of services have brought immense social and economic benefits. For example, the Web service has been turning more and more popular, and it has now become the foundation of surfing the Internet. Unfortunately, some malicious users wreck these services, especially the fundamental and important services, to gain malicious goals. Among all the network attacks, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is one main threat. The attack occurs when multiple users or the hosts (also called bots) controlled by an attacker in different places launch a denial of services at the same time. The goal of the attack is to reduce or destroy availability of services.

(Sparkes Pp. 12-13).

Discussion

Banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and other types of financial institutions that manage large amounts of money online are also often targeted for online and Internet crimes. This happens despite the fact that financial institutions employ the best policies, practices, and technology for keeping money safe. Special laws and government regulations specify the kinds of protections they need to have in place. Yet the vast sums of electronic currency and volume of financial transactions processed by banks and similar institutions are so large, in the trillions of dollars each day, that they remain very attractive targets for cyber thieves (Nutter, Pp. 1-27).

These kinds of organizations are responsible for protecting massive amounts of sensitive and personal data. Cyber offenders recognize the value of such data for committing crimes like ...