Recently there has been a huge entry of misleading applications for example “rogue or fake antivirus applications” that plague users. In other meaning, these programs are rogue applications that display as fake “antivirus scanners” or fake “system cleaners”. For more explanations about this “scareware”, we can start from the definition on Misleading Applications.
Have you seen an unexpected balloon message appear from an unknown program on your computer that telling you’re infected with a new threat? Or have you ever seen a strange security message pop up like an advertisement while you're surfing the web? These are common strategy used by a type of program Symantec calls "misleading applications" and other people refer to as “Rogue AntiSpyware” or “SMITFraud”. These programs typically slip onto their victims’ computer while they surf the web, pretend to be as a normal Microsoft Windows alert, or otherwise trick people into downloading them onto their computer. Once installed, misleading applications make false claims about the security status or performance of victim computer and then assure to solve these bogus troubles if we pay them.
Misleading applications on purpose pretend the security status of our computer and attempt to persuade the victim that he or she must remove unwanted programs that can risk their computer. This application will hold the victim by refusing them to remove or fix the problems until the “required” software is purchased and installed. These threats often look convincing the victim because the programs may look like legitimate security programs and often have corresponding websites with user testimonials, lists of features, etc.
The most frequently question that been ask is “How they attack?” According to the Symantec, this threat typically strikes the victim when they are surfing the web. There is not a single type of website where these applications are found, but they are more common from sites offering pirated goods and contain adult content. They can even sneak into advertisements on legitimate usually through banner ads at the top of the web pages. To make sure it is installed to the system, the victim usually be tricked to download the program. Some of this threat use the small program called “Downloader” have been installed by the attacker through the un-patched flaw in the victim browser (either IE or Mozilla or etc.). This technique also known as a “drive-by” installs.
This misleading application is not the first unwanted program that land to the victim computer. Usually the small program called Downloader such as “Trojan.zlob or Download.MisLeadApp” will impact the system first the automatically download this misleading application. When the download application is installed and ready, the malware that have been installed will inform the victim that their computer have been infected with an unknown threat. This misleading application will then present itself to run scan of that fake infected computer. Then the scan result will produce either entirely false or may include some real issues affecting the system but it will always exaggerate the problems on the system and refuse to fix them until the vendor is paid and a registration key is entered into the program.
This misleading application can be dangerous to us because it trick the consumer into believing a problem exists on their system. The victims who trust the messages are tricked into purchase fake applications to solve for the problems that they have been duped into believing exist. This threat scam victim money, faking the existence of problems and failing to deliver the protection as they promise. They also create a privacy risk as the victim must provide their credit card information to the scammers in order to register the misleading application and solve the supposed problems.
The victims of misleading applications have to pay for the software that does not work, handed their personal information to scammers, and are left with a false sense of security that leads them to potentially greater risks from more aggressive threats. Even if a person catches on to the ruse and does not pay the misleading application vendor, the programs can be notoriously difficult to remove without the proper security software.
Therefore in order to prevent this threat, we as user need to be carefull when we’re surfing the website. Of course to avoid this problem from occur, we need to secure our system by turn on the firewall,install a good antivirus and anti-spyware such as Kaspersky,Norton,Super Anti-spyware and etc and at least once per week do the” house keeping “ to our computer. There are a lot of good antivirus and internet security outside either shareware or freeware. Eventhough sometimes this threat successful bypass the antivirus or internet security guard, at least our system more secure if we compare to the computer that didn’t have any security defense on its system.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Identify the 5 components of Information System; explain how these components are impacted by security?
WMES3106 – Information Security & Control
1) Hardware
-Computer equipment used to perform input, processing, and output activities. For some reason, this hardware might keep the important data like bank account data. In order to make this data save from other threats, the security concerns is important.
2) Software
-The computer programs that govern the operation of the computer. The security aspect for software is very important. Some software was created for important job like the programs that allow computer to process payroll sends bills to customers and provides managers with information to increase profits, reduce costs. If the security aspect not strong, it will be easy hacked by other person and they use for their own benefits. Therefore, the security is important for the software.
3) Data
-Refers to a collection of facts usually collected as the result of experience, observation or experiment. For example transaction data (login user id and password), if there is no security to protect this data, it will be easily stole by hacker. Therefore, it is important to secure the data.
4) Procedure
- Include the strategies, policies, methods and rules. If the procedure in company have low level security, all the strategies, policies, method and rules will be easily retrieve and be manipulate by the third party, thus make the company loss. There to prevent this from occur, the power security is needed.
5) People
-The most important element in most computer-based information system. Large bank can hire hundreds of IS personnel to speed up the profits of the company. However, if the security system of that company so weak and half of the workers are not honest with their job. They can easily take the information from their company and sell to the third-party. Therefore the company profit will run away. So, it is important to have a strong security in the company.
1) Hardware
-Computer equipment used to perform input, processing, and output activities. For some reason, this hardware might keep the important data like bank account data. In order to make this data save from other threats, the security concerns is important.
2) Software
-The computer programs that govern the operation of the computer. The security aspect for software is very important. Some software was created for important job like the programs that allow computer to process payroll sends bills to customers and provides managers with information to increase profits, reduce costs. If the security aspect not strong, it will be easy hacked by other person and they use for their own benefits. Therefore, the security is important for the software.
3) Data
-Refers to a collection of facts usually collected as the result of experience, observation or experiment. For example transaction data (login user id and password), if there is no security to protect this data, it will be easily stole by hacker. Therefore, it is important to secure the data.
4) Procedure
- Include the strategies, policies, methods and rules. If the procedure in company have low level security, all the strategies, policies, method and rules will be easily retrieve and be manipulate by the third party, thus make the company loss. There to prevent this from occur, the power security is needed.
5) People
-The most important element in most computer-based information system. Large bank can hire hundreds of IS personnel to speed up the profits of the company. However, if the security system of that company so weak and half of the workers are not honest with their job. They can easily take the information from their company and sell to the third-party. Therefore the company profit will run away. So, it is important to have a strong security in the company.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Introduction Of Computer Architecture
In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory.
It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture comprises at least three main subcategories.
Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete, description of the system that involves how the constituent parts of the system are interconnected and how they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA.
System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:
system interconnects such as computer buses and switches
memory controllers and hierarchies
CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access
issues like multi-processing.
Once both ISA and microarchitecture has been specified, the actual device needs to be designed into hardware. This design process is often called implementation. Implementation is usually not considered architectural definition, but rather hardware design engineering.
Implementation can be further broken down into three pieces:
Logic Implementation/Design - where the blocks that were defined in the microarchitecture are implemented as logic equations.
Circuit Implementation/Design - where speed critical blocks or logic equations or logic gates are implemented at the transistor level.
Physical Implementation/Design - where the circuits are drawn out, the different circuit components are placed in a chip floor-plan or on a board and the wires connecting them are routed.
For CPUs, the entire implementation process is often called CPU design.
More specific usages of the term include more general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures
Design goals
The exact form of a computer system depends on the constraints and goals for which it was optimized. Computer architectures usually trade off standards, cost, memory capacity, latency and throughput. Sometimes other considerations, such as features, size, weight, reliability, expandability and power consumption are factors as well.
The most common scheme carefully chooses the bottleneck that most reduces the computer's speed. Ideally, the cost is allocated proportionally to assure that the data rate is nearly the same for all parts of the computer, with the most costly part being the slowest. This is how skillful commercial integrators optimize personal computers.
Cost
Generally cost is held constant, determined by either system or commercial requirements.
Performance
Computer performance is often described in terms of clock speed (usually in MHz or GHz). This refers to the cycles per second of the main clock of the CPU. However, this metric is somewhat misleading, as a machine with a higher clock rate may not necessarily have higher performance. As a result manufacturers have moved away from clock speed as a measure of performance. Computer performance can also be measured with the amount of cache a processor contains. If the speed, MHz or GHz, were to be a car then the cache is the traffic light. No matter how fast the car goes it still will not hit that green traffic light. The more speed you have and the more cache you have the faster your processor is.
Modern CPUs can execute multiple instructions per clock cycle, which dramatically speeds up a program. Other factors influence speed, such as the mix of functional units, bus speeds, available memory, and the type and order of instructions in the programs being run.
There are two main types of speed, latency and throughput. Latency is the time between the start of a process and its completion. Throughput is the amount of work done per unit time. Interrupt latency is the guaranteed maximum response time of the system to an electronic event (e.g. when the disk drive finishes moving some data). Performance is affected by a very wide range of design choices — for example, adding cache usually makes latency worse (slower) but makes throughput better. Computers that control machinery usually need low interrupt latencies. These computers operate in a real-time environment and fail if an operation is not completed in a specified amount of time. For example, computer-controlled anti-lock brakes must begin braking almost immediately after they have been instructed to brake.
The performance of a computer can be measured using other metrics, depending upon its application domain. A system may be CPU bound (as in numerical calculation), I/O bound (as in a webserving application) or memory bound (as in video editing). Power consumption has become important in servers and portable devices like laptops.
Benchmarking tries to take all these factors into account by measuring the time a computer takes to run through a series of test programs. Although benchmarking shows strengths, it may not help one to choose a computer. Often the measured machines split on different measures. For example, one system might handle scientific applications quickly, while another might play popular video games more smoothly. Furthermore, designers have been known to add special features to their products, whether in hardware or software, which permit a specific benchmark to execute quickly but which do not offer similar advantages to other, more general tasks.
Power consumption
Power consumption is another design criterion that factors in the design of modern computers. Power efficiency can often be traded for performance or cost benefits. With the increasing power density of modern circuits as the number of transistors per chip scales (Moore's Law), power efficiency has increased in importance. Recent processor designs such as the Intel Core 2 put more emphasis on increasing power efficiency. Also, in the world of embedded computing, power efficiency has long been and remains the primary design goal next to performance.
It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture comprises at least three main subcategories.
Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete, description of the system that involves how the constituent parts of the system are interconnected and how they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA.
System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:
system interconnects such as computer buses and switches
memory controllers and hierarchies
CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access
issues like multi-processing.
Once both ISA and microarchitecture has been specified, the actual device needs to be designed into hardware. This design process is often called implementation. Implementation is usually not considered architectural definition, but rather hardware design engineering.
Implementation can be further broken down into three pieces:
Logic Implementation/Design - where the blocks that were defined in the microarchitecture are implemented as logic equations.
Circuit Implementation/Design - where speed critical blocks or logic equations or logic gates are implemented at the transistor level.
Physical Implementation/Design - where the circuits are drawn out, the different circuit components are placed in a chip floor-plan or on a board and the wires connecting them are routed.
For CPUs, the entire implementation process is often called CPU design.
More specific usages of the term include more general wider-scale hardware architectures, such as cluster computing and Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) architectures
Design goals
The exact form of a computer system depends on the constraints and goals for which it was optimized. Computer architectures usually trade off standards, cost, memory capacity, latency and throughput. Sometimes other considerations, such as features, size, weight, reliability, expandability and power consumption are factors as well.
The most common scheme carefully chooses the bottleneck that most reduces the computer's speed. Ideally, the cost is allocated proportionally to assure that the data rate is nearly the same for all parts of the computer, with the most costly part being the slowest. This is how skillful commercial integrators optimize personal computers.
Cost
Generally cost is held constant, determined by either system or commercial requirements.
Performance
Computer performance is often described in terms of clock speed (usually in MHz or GHz). This refers to the cycles per second of the main clock of the CPU. However, this metric is somewhat misleading, as a machine with a higher clock rate may not necessarily have higher performance. As a result manufacturers have moved away from clock speed as a measure of performance. Computer performance can also be measured with the amount of cache a processor contains. If the speed, MHz or GHz, were to be a car then the cache is the traffic light. No matter how fast the car goes it still will not hit that green traffic light. The more speed you have and the more cache you have the faster your processor is.
Modern CPUs can execute multiple instructions per clock cycle, which dramatically speeds up a program. Other factors influence speed, such as the mix of functional units, bus speeds, available memory, and the type and order of instructions in the programs being run.
There are two main types of speed, latency and throughput. Latency is the time between the start of a process and its completion. Throughput is the amount of work done per unit time. Interrupt latency is the guaranteed maximum response time of the system to an electronic event (e.g. when the disk drive finishes moving some data). Performance is affected by a very wide range of design choices — for example, adding cache usually makes latency worse (slower) but makes throughput better. Computers that control machinery usually need low interrupt latencies. These computers operate in a real-time environment and fail if an operation is not completed in a specified amount of time. For example, computer-controlled anti-lock brakes must begin braking almost immediately after they have been instructed to brake.
The performance of a computer can be measured using other metrics, depending upon its application domain. A system may be CPU bound (as in numerical calculation), I/O bound (as in a webserving application) or memory bound (as in video editing). Power consumption has become important in servers and portable devices like laptops.
Benchmarking tries to take all these factors into account by measuring the time a computer takes to run through a series of test programs. Although benchmarking shows strengths, it may not help one to choose a computer. Often the measured machines split on different measures. For example, one system might handle scientific applications quickly, while another might play popular video games more smoothly. Furthermore, designers have been known to add special features to their products, whether in hardware or software, which permit a specific benchmark to execute quickly but which do not offer similar advantages to other, more general tasks.
Power consumption
Power consumption is another design criterion that factors in the design of modern computers. Power efficiency can often be traded for performance or cost benefits. With the increasing power density of modern circuits as the number of transistors per chip scales (Moore's Law), power efficiency has increased in importance. Recent processor designs such as the Intel Core 2 put more emphasis on increasing power efficiency. Also, in the world of embedded computing, power efficiency has long been and remains the primary design goal next to performance.
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