A Beginner's Guide to Cyber-Security and Computer Virus : Everything you need to know

Cyberspace (internet, work environment, intranet) is becoming a dangerous place for all Organizations and individuals to protect their sensitive data or reputation. This is because of the numerous people and machines accessing it. It is important to mention that the recent studies have shown a big danger is coming from internal threats or from disappointed employees like the Edward Snowden case, another internal threat is that information material can be easy accessible over the internet.

One important indicator is the IT skills of a person that wants to hack or to breach your security has decreased but the success rate of it has increased, this is because of three main factors:

1. Hacking tools that can be found very easily by everyone just by googling and they are endless.

2. Technology with the end-users has increased rapidly within these years, like internet bandwidth and computer processing speeds.

3. Access to hacking information manuals.

All this can make even a school boy with the curiosity, a potential hacker for your organization. Since locking down all networks is not an available option, the only response the security managers can give is to harden their networks, applications and operating systems to a reasonable level of safety, and conducting a business disaster recovery plan.

The following graph gives us basic idea:

Do you know, in this digital world, what is the biggest hole or weak link in prospect of security? 

The answer is simple, we HUMANS.

Most of the security breaches come from uninformed and untrained persons which give information to a third party or publish data in Internet without knowing the consequences. For Example, we may tend to post so many photos on social media sites that even enough information can be gained to target that individual. Someone might post a photo of a new home, graduation, workplace, regular go-to places etc. From these, a stalker can obtain address of victim, where he / she studies thus further obtaining more information from the graduation institute. Personal and work information from workplace picture and even regular visiting places might make that victim more traceable.

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Potential Losses Due to Cyber Attacks:

The potential loses in this cyberspace are many even if you are using a single computer in your room. Here, I will be listing some examples that have a direct impact on you and on others:

1. Losing your data :- If your computer has been hacked or infected, there is a big chance that all your stored data might be taken by the attacker.

2. Bad usage of computer resources :- This means that your network or computer can go in overload so you cannot access your genuine services or in a worst case scenario, it can be used by the hacker to attack another machine or network.

3. Reputation Loss :- Just think if your Facebook account or business email has been owned by a social engineering attack and it sends fake information to your friends, business partners. You will need time to gain back your reputation.

4. Identity Theft :- This is a case where your identity is stolen (photo, name surname, address, and credit card) and can be used for a crime like making false identity documents.

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Basic Computer Security Checklist

There are some basic things that everyone one of us whoever is using digital devices such as Computers or Laptops needs to do:

1. Check if your system is password protected.

2. Make sure that your system is always updated. Updating releases security patch notes sometimes and might get into effect after updating, thus making your system more secure.

3. Check if  anti-virus or anti-malware software is installed.

4. Check for the unusual services running that consumes resources.

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Different elements in Cyber Security

In order to fulfil these requirements, we come to the three main elements which are confidentiality, integrity, and availability and the recently added authenticity and utility.

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is the concealment of information or resources. Also, there is a need to keep information secret from other third parties that want to have access to it, so just the right people can access it.

Example in real life: Let’s say there are two people communicating via an encrypted email they know the decryption keys of each other and they read the email by entering these keys into the email program. If someone else can read these decryption keys when they are entered into the program, then the confidentiality of that email is compromised.

Integrity

Integrity is the trustworthiness of data in the systems or resources by the point of view of preventing unauthorized and improper changes. Generally, Integrity is composed of two sub-elements – data-integrity, which it has to do with the content of the data and authentication which has to do with the origin of the data as such information has values only if it is correct.

Example in real life: Let’s say you are doing an online payment of 5 USD, but your information is tampered without your knowledge in a way by sending to the seller 500 USD, this would cost you too much.

In this case cryptography plays a very major role in ensuring data integrity. Commonly used methods to protect data integrity includes hashing the data you receive and comparing it with the hash of the original message. However, this means that the hash of the original data must be provided in a secure way.

 Availability

Availability refers to the ability to access data of a resource when it is needed, as such the information has value only if the authorized people can access at right time. Denying access to data nowadays has become a common attack. Imagine a downtime of a live server how costly it can be.

Example in real life: Let’s say a hacker has compromised a webserver of a bank and put it down. You as an authenticated user want to do an e-banking transfer but it is impossible to access it, the undone transfer is a money lost for the bank.

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Guidelines for Windows OS Security

Following are the list of guidelines for Windows Operating System Security.

1. Use the licensed versions of Windows OS, not the cracked or pirated ones and activate them in order to take genuine updates.

2. Disable Unused Users: To do this, Right Click on Computer – Manage – Local Users and Groups – Users, then disable those users that are not required. In my case, I disabled the Guest and Administrator users and I created a new non-default like Admin.

3. Disable unused shares: By default, Windows OS creates shares, please see the following screenshot. You have to disable them and to do this, you follow:

Right Click on My Computer – Manage – Shared Folders – Right Click Stop Sharing.

4. The next step is to take updates regularly for Windows OS. It is recommended to do them automatically and periodically. To set this up, go to Control Panel – System and Security – Windows Updates –OK.

5. Put your Windows System Firewall up, this will block all the unauthorized services that make traffic. To set this up, go to Control Panel – System and Security –Windows Firewall.

6. Install a licensed antivirus and take updates, in the coming sections we will cover in detail about antiviruses. It is strongly recommended not to download from torrents and install cracked versions.

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What is Virus?

We should remember that viruses infect outside machines only with the assistance of a computer user only. These can happen by clicking a file that comes attached with email from an unknown person, plugging a USB without scanning, opening unsafe URLs for that reason. We as system administrators have to remove the administrator permissions of users in these computers. We categorize malwares in three types:

1. Trojans and Rootkits

2. Virus

3. Worms

Characteristic of Virus:

1. They reside in a computer’s memory and activates themselves while the program  that is attached starts running.

For example: They attach themselves in general to the explorer.exe in windows OS because it is the process that is running all the time, so you should be cautious when this process starts to consume too much of your computer capacities.

2. They modify themselves after the infection phase like they source codes, extensions, new files, etc. so it is harder for an antivirus to detect them.

3. They always try to hide themselves in Operating System in encrypted way.

For Example : You can see this in the following image for better understanding as in my computer I found this file as shown on next image.

After finding this file, I opened it with a text editor and as thought the text was not Understandable as shown in the following screenshot on the next image.

After finding this, I tried it on a base64 decoder and I found that it was a Virus file.

This virus can cause the following to your computer:

1. It may delete important data from your computer to gain space for their processes.

2.  It may avoid detection by redirection of disk data.

3. may perform tasks by triggering an event with itself. For example, this happens when in an infected computer pop-up tables etc., show up automatically on the screen.

4. They are common in Windows and Mac OS because these operation systems do not have multiple file permissions and are more spread out.

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References:

www.sio2corp.com

www.tutorialspoint.com

1.  Jump up^ Bell, David J. et al, eds. (2004). "Virus". Cyberculture: The Key Concepts. Routledge. p. 154. ISBN 9780203647059.

2.    Jump up^ Stallings, William (2012). Computer security : principles and practice. Boston: Pearson. p. 182. ISBN 978-0-13-277506-9

https://www.base64encode.org/enc/virus

www.quantenblog.net/security/virus-scanner-bypass

 

https://www.wikihow.com/Create-a-Fake-and-Harmless-Virus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkxtOr2RLbY

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