Quality of Information and Malware by Ashok Panwar

Presented by:-
Ashok Panwar
Technical Officer in ECIL (NPCIL)
Tarapur, Mumbai

 Under engineering point of view:
• Study of the characteristics and statistics of the
language that will allow an analysis from a
mathematical, scientific and technical focus.
 Under company point of view:
• All data that the company owns and manages and
messages that persons and/or machines
exchange inside an organization.
Presented by:- Ashok Panwar
Technical Officer in ECIL
2

 The study made by Claude Shannon in the years
after the 2nd World War has allowed, besides other
things:
• To quantify the quantity of information.
• To measure the entropy of information.
• To define a system with a perfect secret.
• To calculate the redundancy and rate of language.
• To find the distance of unicity.
The whole study made by Shannon is oriented to classic
cryptosystems that encrypt letters, which are not of interest
in this book. Nevertheless, in one of the following chapters
we can see these systems on detail since they allow to
analyze easily the perfect secret systems.

3

• It will be understood as:
– The entire data and files that the company owns.
– All the exchanged messages.
– All the records about clients and providers.
– All the records about products.
– Definitely, the know-how of the organization.
• If this information gets lost or it´s degraded,
it will be very difficult for the company to
recover itself to continue being competitive.
For this reason, it is vital to implant security
policies.
4

• The introduction of policies and actions to assure information
security in the company is being taken into account only since
last years of the past decade. In this new century, it is an
estrategic factor for the develop and the success of such
company. After the facts occurred in the Twin Towers in year
2001, several companies have disappear after loosing all its
own information. It is a warning for all of us.
• Success in one company will highly depend
on the quality of information that it´s
generated and managed. Thus, one
company will have quality of information if
this allows, besides other things,
confidentiality, integrity and disponibility.
5

• Information (data) will be altered by many
factors, affecting this basically to the
aspects of confidentiality, integrity and
disponibility of the company.
• From the point of view of the company,
one of the most important problems can
be the one related with computing crimes,
either by external or internal factors. We
must be very careful with the internal
factor.
A dissatisfied
employee...
6

Solution seems to be
very simple: to apply
new technics and
security policies ...
The treatment and vulnerability of the information will be influenced
by other themes, like the current legal aspects. Besides, companies
depend more on their communications and on their networkings
everyday, what increases their insecurity.
... This idea is
just starting to be
seriously
considered.
Policy 1
Policy
2
Polícy 3
Polícy 4
Solution
7

A non authorized person could:
• Classify and declassify data.
• Filter information.
• Alter information.
• Erase information.
• Usurp data.
• Have a look at classified information.
• Deduce confidential data.
Therefore,
protection of
data results
obvious
8

 The most elemental action to protect data is to
determine a good policy of security copies or
backups:
• Complete Backup
 All the data (the first time).
• Incremental Backups
 Only the files that have been created or modified since the
last backup are copied.
• Ellaboration of backup plans according to the total
volume of generated information
 Type of copies, cycle of this operation, correct labeling.
 Diary, weekly, monthly: table creation.
• Stablishing who, how and where data are kept.
9

• Hacker:
– Initial definition inicial proposed by MIT engineers who
were proud about their knowledge in computers.
– Besides many other classifications we find White Hat´s one
(not criminal in general), Black Hat (criminal in general) and
Grey Hat (reconverted by companies).
• Cracker:
– Person who tries, ilegally, to break the security of a system
only for entertainment or personal purposes.
• Script kiddie:
– An inexpert person, perhaps a boy, which uses programs
downloaded from the Internet to attack systems.
10

Companies related to New Information Technologies
NITs make use of several technics and tools for
networks in order to provide data exchange:
• File transference (ftp)
• Information and data transference through Internet
(http)
• Remote connections to machines and servers
(telnet)
All these technics will suffer risks attacks on the part
of computing delinquents, but ...
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Even though being well organized these
groups of delinquents, first of all we have
to take it easy so we won't become
paranoic. Futhermore, we must catch on
that the real enemy can be inside our
"home"...
The solution continues being still the
same: the implantation of an adecuate
security policy inside the company.
12

These are actions that vulnerate confidentiality, integrity
and disponibility of information.
– Attacks to computers and network systems:
 Fraud Misappropiation  Robbery
 Sabotage  Spionage  Blackmail
 Revelation  Mascarade  Virus
 Worms  Trojans  Spam
Let´s see some
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Fraud
Deliberated act of data manipulation by harming to a physical or juridical
person that suffers this way an economic loss. The author of the crime
obtains this way a benefice which uses to be economic.
Sabotage
Action by which it is desired to harm one company deliberately obstructing
its functioning, damaging their equipment, tools, software, etc. The author
does not usually obtain economic benefices but creates great chaos into
the organization.
14

Blackmail
Action that consists of demanding a certain quantity of money in order of
not making public privileged or confidential information and that can affect
thoroughly to that company, usually to its corporative image.
Mascarade
Utilization of one key by a non authorized person that gets into the system
supplanting an identity. This way, the intruder will own then the
documentation,information and data of other users that can be used, for
instance, to blackmail the organization.
15

Virus
Code designed to be introduced into a program, to modify or to destroy
data. It is copied automatically to other programs to perpetuate its life
cycle. It is very common that it spreads through templates, application
macros and executable files.
Worms
Virus activated and transmited through the network. Its purpose it´s to
multiplicate itself until running out the space of disks or RAM. It uses to be
one of the most dangerous attacks because it normally produces
collapses into the networks as we already know.
16

Trojans
Virus that gets into the computer and shows a similar behaviour to that fact
referred on the greek mithology. Thus, it seems to be an inoffensive thing
or program when it is actually doing another thing and spreading itself. It
can be very dangerous when the programmer or the company itself installs
it into one program.
Spam
The spam or not desired email, although it cannot be properly considered
as a real attack, the fact is that nowadays, it can produce important
information losses in companies and organisms.
17

Communications nowadays work this way and they will grow more
every time to become open systems like, for instance, current
wireless networks, so new menaces will rise...
This constant confrontation between the dark side or
the evil (the Ying) and the light side or the good (the
Yang), like this symbol belonging to ancestral religions
and philosophies shows, will be inevitable in an
intercomunicated and open system like current ones.
There are lots of crimes and menaces.
Perhaps in an inmediate future new crimes and attacks to computing
and network systems will appear that, right now, we still do not know
how they will be or which vulnerability will they exploit.
18

 Next slides are only a brief and elemental introduction to the
world of computing viruses, oriented besides to the world of
PCs and to the Windows environment. It does not seek to be a
document that goes deeply into the virus and malware world as
we could expect due to the importance of them nowadays.
 This paragraph is included exactly on this chapter as one more
factor to be taken into account as soon as the quality of
information that we manage.
 Many people consider this as minor theme; however, inside the
companies this is one of the most important problems that
responsibles in IT security may face.
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• First example: John von Neuman in 1949.
• First virus: M. Gouglas of Bell Laboratories creates the Core
War in 1960.
• Firsts attacks to PCs between 1985 and 1987:
– Virus Jerusalem and Brain.
• Inoffensives (balls, letters that move, etc.)
– They just annoy and obstruct the work but do not destroy
any information. They could reside inside the PC.
• Malicious (Friday 13, Blaster, Nimbda, etc.)
– They destroy all the data and affect to the integrity and
disponibility of the system. They must be removed.
http://www.virusbtn.com/
More information available in:
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• They are transmited just through the execution of one program. This is very
important to remember.
• The email, by definition, cannot contain virus since is being formed only by
text. Nevertheless, many times they contain attached files or either the
visors execute any code into the email client of the user and these can
have a virus included. This is the most critical point in security regarding
virus; the trusting user, tempted by something, cheated with the
denominated social engineeering, etc., opens the file. There resides the
danger.
• Web environment is still more dangerous. One link can launch a Java (or
any other language) program that will be executed by the client and will
infect or destroy the machine.
21

• There are some virus that infect programs with
extensions exe, com and sys, for example.
– They reside into the memory when the host is
executed and they spread themselves to other
files.
• And some that infect the system and the boot sector
and entrance tables (determined areas of the disk).
– They are directly installed there and therefore
they reside into the memory.
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• Protect the removable disks -today mainly with USB flash
technology- with the security jumper. It is a basic writing
protection and also very elemental.
• Install an antivirus SW and periodically keep it up-to-date. It is
recommendable to do it once a week at least.
• Execute the antivirus scan on the hard disk once a month.
• Execute always the antivirus scan to every disk or CD
introduced into the system and to the files downloaded from the
Internet or attached in e-mails.
• If you are not sure, resort to freeware tools in Internet (*).
• Control the access of unknown people to the computer.
• Use legal software, with license.
http://www.virustotal.com/en/indexf.html
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• Stop remote connections.
• Do not activate the mouse or the keyboard.
• Shutdown the system and disconnect it.
• Boot with a bootable or emergency diskette protected
and execute then an antivirus program.
• If possible, make a backup of the files. Note: make
backups often.
• Format low level the hard disk if there´s no solution .
• Install again the operative system and restore with
data from backups.
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1. What is the difference between the concept of information and
its quality according to what a company or engineering
studies understand?
2. Why is it said that the information of a company is its most
valuable asset? Compare this asset with its own stuff and
pose situations on which both are lost, which situation could
be more damaging for the continuity of such company?
3. As security responsibles we´ve detected that somebody is
making illegal actions, for example non authorized copies of
information. What attitude shall we take?
4. What measures could be the most adecuated in order to
minimize the virus attacks in our company?
5. If we desire to have our company protected both physically
and logically, what should we do?
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Quality of Information and Malware by Ashok Panwar

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