DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN INTRUISION TOLERANT SYSTEM

1.3     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

           The computer security problem includes lots of buggy and insecure applications.  Attackers can infect your system with malware and steal credentials like credit card details, passwords etc. Example of this is a malware called SilentBanker. It appends itself to your computer and stays silent. Now anytime your computer makes a web request to port 80 or 443 it monitors the request. Though port 443 is encrypted using SSL it doesn't bother the malware. The malware injects malicious javascript to the target page to change it so whenever you type your password for authentication the password would get sent to the attacker. This malware was used to steal a lot of passwords from UK banks.

 An attacker can steal your IP address and use it to send spam messages. An attacker does this to protect himself and shift the blame to the person whose computer he uses to send the spam messages. There are organizations that provide Denial of Service as a service. That is they can attack a web page or web server for a fee you pay. They do this by bombarding either a web server or web page with a lot of requests than it can process.