Introduction
I’m an information security analyst for the Brevard Public School District in Viera Florida. My job is rather new and was brought on by the growth of the internet and the need to protect confidential and/or financial data in our connected world. I work with hundreds of adults and students every year who know computers and the internet well but they don’t necessarily know a lot about what it is to be a responsible cyber citizen. Are they to blame? Of course not. My father’s generation created the internet and never could have imagined in a thousand years that the internet would be become what it has become today. What? You never received any cyber security training? Guess what?—kids still don’t today.
As a professional who works in education I think it’s time for this to change. Our country’s future economic stability depends on it! Why am I writing this book? The answer is to share my knowledge and experience with each one of you. You may be a teacher, a student, a lawyer, a doctor or a landscaper, just to name a few occupations. You have at least one computer and you are doing a lot of cool things online. You just want to use the internet without being taken advantage of by cyber criminals.
You have probably encountered the term Malware, (Malicious Software) at some point. It’s sometimes called a Virus or a Worm depending on how it is transmitted and propagated within a computer system or network. Over time malware has become quite sophisticated. What started as a prank in the 1980’s is now a multibillion dollar cyber crime industry. Did you know that you can have all your personal data taken from your computer just by visiting a web site?
A few questions to think about: Should you really open that cute email and send it to 20 people? What was the motivation for sending it? Was it just the inspiring message or maybe the scenic pictures that you thought were so good? Can you identify an online Scam? Did you know that no computer is immune to cyber attacks? Neither is the Federal Government. In 2009 the $300 billion US joint strike fighter was compromised via the internet! And in 2006 UCLA lost 800,000 student and staff records to a cyber crime gang in another part of the world.
So where do you come in? What do you have to lose? So you say your bank eats it if your account gets drained. Well, first, if banks get hit so do all consumers that’s just how it works, any losses get passed onto consumers. It hurts our country too! Besides that, identity theft can take years to rectify and you are on your own for that. So back to being a responsible cyber citizen; we have all learned how to drive a car and hopefully we are responsible drivers, at least there is training and a test for drivers of automobiles. What about being a responsible cyber citizen? Can you actually cause our country and yourself to lose thousands of dollars just by not being aware of the dangers that lurk on the internet? Yes, and that’s another reason for writing this book.
This book is dedicated to everyone that is just trying to do a job on the internet, to be creative and productive or just to reach out to friends and family via email and social networking sites. I dedicate this book to you, to my family, all my friends, coworkers, and to all students. You might even be a technology expert who has to deal with the onslaught of spam and browser pop ups that users fall for time and again. You know better than most that technology can only do so much; we must also educate users. That’s the purpose of this book.
This book covers all the basics from how the internet was never designed for security and privacy to why social networking’s business model did not include it either. With social networks people are the product and security gets in the way. I will also cover the early, what I like to call the “tame” internet, the 1980s and beyond, the present and “untamed” internet, how our legal system can’t keep up with technology. Finally, I will provide a personal action plan to help you slow cybercrime. You can make a difference! Our nation’s economy and our children’s future depend on it!
History of the Computer and Malware
This book would not be complete without a look at these important historical events:
1969, ARPANET, the world’s first packet switched computer network, was established on October 29 between nodes at Leonard Kleinrock’s lab at UCLA. In 2006 it becomes the Nations largest University hack! (1)
1970 The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) launches ARPANET (Which later becomes the Internet)
1971 Ray Tomlinson writes the first email program and uses it on ARPANET
1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen form Microsoft.
1976 Stephen Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and Ron Wayne form Apple Computer as a hobby!
1981 Ian Murphy becomes the first hacker to be tried and convicted as a felon.
1983 ARPANET splits into Government and civilian sectors; the civilian sector later becomes the present-day Internet. The film War Games popularizes hacking
1984 The famous hacker group, Legion of Doom, is formed. Apple Computer launched the Macintosh, the first successful mouse-driven computer with a graphic user interface. They announce it via a 1.5 million commercial during the 1984 Super Bowl.
1987 IBM Introduces the PS2 with VGA Video Graphics Array Chip and a 3-inch floppy that stores 1.44 Megabytes! (We now all have USB memory sticks we carry in our pockets and purses that are at least 4 Gig. That’s 4 billion bytes)
1988 Robert Morris, the son of a computer security expert for the NSA (National Security Agency), floods ARPANET with a worm. It caused problems for thousands of hosts linked to the network.
1990 The World Wide Web (WWW) was born when Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher at CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, developed Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTML. (This finally made web browsing and internet access easy for everyone.)
1991 Phil Zimmermann introduces Pretty Good Privacy. Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, is an e-mail encryption program. It’s the most widely adopted email encryption system in use today. (Encryption secures your data from would be snoopers, see Appendix A for more about encryption)
1992 Microsoft introduces Windows 3.1. It sells more than 1 million copies within the first two months of release. (Yes, I actually had this on my PC!)
1994 Netscape and Yahoo are founded. Netscape for its popular browser and Yahoo as an early search engine still in use today. (There was no Google yet!)
1995 Computerhacker Kevin Mitnick is arrested by the FBI.
1996 Google is first developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
1997 Microsoft announces Windows 98.
1998 The CIH virus also known as Chernobyl virus is created and begins infecting computers and starts executing one year later on April 26, 1999.
1999 The Melissa Virus begins infecting computers March 26, 1999 and quickly spreads around the globe over e-mail in hours and becomes one of the fastest spreading viruses in history.
2000 Young Filipino students releases the ILOVEYOU e-mail virus that begins infecting computers and spreading over the Internet May 5, 2000.
2001 The Code Red worm begins infecting Windows computers in July 2001 with the intention of performing a DDoS attack on the White House government web page. The worm is estimated in causing $2 billion in damages and never succeeded in its attack
2002 Jan de Wit aka OnTheFly is convicted May 1, 2002 for the Anna Kournikova virus.
2003 The Slammer worm is first released in January 2003 and becomes the fastest spreading worm in history after infecting hundreds of thousands of computers in less than three hours.
2004 The Mydoom computer virus with 250,000 infected computer begin to dos attack the SCO site February 1.
2005