What To Do With A Hacked Computer Definition Of MalwareI Got Hacked. Now What Do I Do? Jesper M. Johansson, Ph. Tech and Science topics: phones, computers, gadgets, and the Internet, astronomy & earth science, climate & weather, environment & green living and much more. A Trojan horse or Trojan is a type of malware that is often disguised as legitimate software. Trojans can be employed by cyber-thieves and hackers trying to gain. This Slang page is designed to explain what the meaning of hack is. The slang word / phrase / acronym hack means. Online Slang Dictionary. A list of slang words. D., CISSP, MCSE, MCP+ISecurity Program Manager. Microsoft Corporation. After the very long Patch Management article last month, this month’s article is much shorter and to the point. Let’s just say you did not install the patches like we discussed last month. Now you got hacked. What to do? So, you didn’t patch the system and it got hacked. Well, let’s see: You can’t clean a compromised system by patching it. Patching only removes the vulnerability. Upon getting into your system, the attacker probably ensured that there were several other ways to get back in. You can’t clean a compromised system by removing the back doors. You can never guarantee that you found all the back doors the attacker put in. The fact that you can’t find any more may only mean you don’t know where to look, or that the system is so compromised that what you are seeing is not actually what is there. You can’t clean a compromised system by using some “vulnerability remover.” Let’s say you had a system hit by Blaster. A number of vendors (including Microsoft) published vulnerability removers for Blaster. Can you trust a system that had Blaster after the tool is run? If the system was vulnerable to Blaster, it was also vulnerable to a number of other attacks. Can you guarantee that none of those have been run against it? I didn’t think so. You can’t clean a compromised system by using a virus scanner. To tell you the truth, a fully compromised system can’t be trusted. Even virus scanners must at some level rely on the system to not lie to them. If they ask whether a particular file is present, the attacker may simply have a tool in place that lies about it. Note that if you can guarantee that the only thing that compromised the system was a particular virus or worm and you know that this virus has no back doors associated with it, and the vulnerability used by the virus was not available remotely, then a virus scanner can be used to clean the system. For example, the vast majority of e- mail worms rely on a user opening an attachment. In this particular case, it is possible that the only infection on the system is the one that came from the attachment containing the worm. However, if the vulnerability used by the worm was available remotely without user action, then you can’t guarantee that the worm was the only thing that used that vulnerability. It is entirely possible that something else used the same vulnerability. In this case, you can’t just patch the system. You can’t clean a compromised system by reinstalling the operating system over the existing installation. Again, the attacker may very well have tools in place that tell the installer lies. If that happens, the installer may not actually remove the compromised files. In addition, the attacker may also have put back doors in non- operating system components. You can’t trust any data copied from a compromised system. Once an attacker gets into a system, all the data on it may be modified. In the best- case scenario, copying data off a compromised system and putting it on a clean system will give you potentially untrustworthy data. In the worst- case scenario, you may actually have copied a back door hidden in the data. You can’t trust the event logs on a compromised system. Upon gaining full access to a system, it is simple for an attacker to modify the event logs on that system to cover any tracks. If you rely on the event logs to tell you what has been done to your system, you may just be reading what the attacker wants you to read. You may not be able to trust your latest backup. How can you tell when the original attack took place? The event logs cannot be trusted to tell you. Without that knowledge, your latest backup is useless. It may be a backup that includes all the back doors currently on the system. The only way to clean a compromised system is to flatten and rebuild. That’s right. If you have a system that has been completely compromised, the only thing you can do is to flatten the system (reformat the system disk) and rebuild it from scratch (reinstall Windows and your applications). Alternatively, you could of course work on your resume instead, but I don’t want to see you doing that. This list makes patching look not so bad, yes? We may hate patches, but the alternative is decidedly worse. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship - boyd - 2. Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication. Introduction. Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as My. Space, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre- existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality- based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video- sharing. Scholars from disparate fields have examined SNSs in order to understand the practices, implications, culture, and meaning of the sites, as well as users’ engagement with them. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer- Mediated Communication brings together a unique collection of articles that analyze a wide spectrum of social network sites using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches. By collecting these articles in this issue, our goal is to showcase some of the interdisciplinary scholarship around these sites. The purpose of this introduction is to provide a conceptual, historical, and scholarly context for the articles in this collection. We begin by defining what constitutes a social network site and then present one perspective on the historical development of SNSs, drawing from personal interviews and public accounts of sites and their changes over time. Following this, we review recent scholarship on SNSs and attempt to contextualize and highlight key works. We conclude with a description of the articles included in this special section and suggestions for future research. Social Network Sites: A Definition. We define social network sites as web- based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi- public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site. While we use the term “social network site” to describe this phenomenon, the term “social networking sites” also appears in public discourse, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. We chose not to employ the term “networking” for two reasons: emphasis and scope. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer- mediated communication (CMC). What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between “latent ties” (Haythornthwaite, 2. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily “networking” or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them “social network sites.”While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone consists of visible profiles that display an articulated list of Friends. Profiles are unique pages where one can “type oneself into being” (Sund. After joining an SNS, an individual is asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which typically include descriptors such as age, location, interests, and an “about me” section. Most sites also encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow users to enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile’s look and feel. Others, such as Facebook, allow users to add modules (“Applications”) that enhance their profile. The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default, profiles on Friendster and Tribe. Alternatively, Linked. In controls what a viewer may see based on whether she or he has a paid account. Sites like My. Space allow users to choose whether they want their profile to be public or “Friends only.” Facebook takes a different approach—by default, users who are part of the same “network” can view each other’s profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to deny permission to those in their network. Structural variations around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other. Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs and dates when community sites re- launched with SNS features. After joining a social network site, users are prompted to identify others in the system with whom they have a relationship. The label for these relationships differs depending on the site—popular terms include “Friends,”“Contacts,” and “Fans.” Most SNSs require bi- directional confirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one- directional ties are sometimes labeled as “Fans” or “Followers,” but many sites call these Friends as well. The term “Friends” can be misleading, because the connection does not necessarily mean friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons people connect are varied (boyd, 2. The public display of connections is a crucial component of SNSs. The Friends list contains links to each Friend’s profile, enabling viewers to traverse the network graph by clicking through the Friends lists. On most sites, the list of Friends is visible to anyone who is permitted to view the profile, although there are exceptions. For instance, some My. Space users have hacked their profiles to hide the Friends display, and Linked. In allows users to opt out of displaying their network. Most SNSs also provide a mechanism for users to leave messages on their Friends’ profiles. This feature typically involves leaving “comments,” although sites employ various labels for this feature. In addition, SNSs often have a private messaging feature similar to webmail. While both private messages and comments are popular on most of the major SNSs, they are not universally available. Not all social network sites began as such. QQ started as a Chinese instant messaging service, Lunar. Storm as a community site, Cyworld as a Korean discussion forum tool, and Skyrock (formerly Skyblog) was a French blogging service before adding SNS features. Classmates. com, a directory of school affiliates launched in 1. Friends after SNSs became popular. Asian. Avenue, Mi. Gente, and Black. Planet were early popular ethnic community sites with limited Friends functionality before re- launching in 2. SNS features and structure. Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and private messaging, SNSs vary greatly in their features and user base. Some have photo- sharing or video- sharing capabilities; others have built- in blogging and instant messaging technology. There are mobile- specific SNSs (e. Dodgeball), but some web- based SNSs also support limited mobile interactions (e. Facebook, My. Space, and Cyworld). Many SNSs target people from specific geographical regions or linguistic groups, although this does not always determine the site’s constituency. Orkut, for example, was launched in the United States with an English- only interface, but Portuguese- speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group (Kopytoff, 2. Some sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, political, or other identity- driven categories in mind. There are even SNSs for dogs (Dogster) and cats (Catster), although their owners must manage their profiles. While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible, many attract homogeneous populations initially, so it is not uncommon to find groups using sites to segregate themselves by nationality, age, educational level, or other factors that typically segment society (Hargittai, this issue), even if that was not the intention of the designers. A History of Social Network Sites. The Early Years. According to the definition above, the first recognizable social network site launched in 1. Six. Degrees. com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1. Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before Six. Degrees, of course. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to others. Classmates. com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or list Friends until years later. Six. Degrees was the first to combine these features. Six. Degrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others. While Six. Degrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable business and, in 2. Looking back, its founder believes that Six. Degrees was simply ahead of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 1. While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting strangers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2017
Categories |