Peer to Peer Magazine

the quarterly magazine of ILTA 65 Peer to Peer publicized) bugs in Windows and other commercial software products. We are still patching. _____________________________________ 1998 RIAA sues Napster and then everybody else for illegal file sharing. _____________________________________ 1999, March "Melissa" leverages MS Office macro language and MS Outlook to clog e-mail systems. The author, David L. Smith of New Jersey, spends 20 months in federal prison. ______________________________________ 2000's 2000 Y2K: Was it a myth or a disaster avoided? ______________________________________ 2000 ILOVEYOU virus is credited with five to ten billion dollars in damage. ______________________________________ 2001 A banner year for viruses with Anna Kournikova (Feb.), Sircam (July), Code Red (July), Nimda (Sept.) and Klez (Oct.). ______________________________________ 2001, september 11 Terrorists change the world forever. ______________________________________ 2001 Microsoft becomes the prominent victim of a new type of hack that attacks the domain name server; DNS paths that take users to Microsoft's websites are corrupted. ______________________________________ 2002, october A distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack takes down 9 of the 13 root DNS servers. 2003 Slammer exploits weaknesses in MS SQL server. ______________________________________ 2003, august 14 A cascading failure takes 265 power plants offline. 55 million people are plunged into darkness, many in heated, congested cities. ______________________________________ 2005, september Katrina wreaks devastation in New Orleans. ______________________________________ 2006 Almost half of phishing thefts in 2006 were committed by groups operating through the Russian Business Network based in St. Petersburg. ______________________________________ 2006, July A fire damages or destroys a small percentage of records in an Iron Mountain facility in Ottawa on July 11. The next day, a 126,000 sq. ft. Iron Mountain facility in London is burned to the ground in a total loss for 600 storage customers. ______________________________________ 2007 FBI identifies one million bot- infected PCs in June and another million in November during operations "Bot Roast" and "Bot Roast II." ______________________________________ 2008 Amazon experiences two outages of their cloud-based S3 storage service, two hours in February and eight hours in July. ______________________________________ 2008, february 17 Mocmex trojan is first piece of malware that employs digital photo frames as the transmission vector. (Note: ILTAn Jerry Askew was one of the original I.T. professionals to observe and report this threat to the general public.) 2008 Torpig/Sinowal/Webroot Trojan infects PCs, disables A/V and steals sensitive info from infected PCs such as account names and passwords. _____________________________________ 2008, July Terry Childs, a disgruntled employee of the city of San Francisco, disables all administrative accounts but his own on the city's WAN and refuses to disclose his own, lone remaining valid login. He eventually meets secretly with the mayor to whom he gives his password. ______________________________________ 2008, July 31 The Koobface computer worm targets users of Facebook and Myspace. ______________________________________ 2009 Conficker infects Microsoft servers around the world. Microsoft offers a $250,000 bounty for information leading to the capture of the author. ______________________________________ 2010 Google discloses that it has been a target of ongoing cyberattacks originating in China. In an example of successful social engineering hacking techniques, attackers were able to install spyware on the most resilient of networks by communicating with key employees over IM and manipulating the targeted employees who had access to sensitive data. ILTA ______________________________________ Many thanks to Mark Manoukian and his Open Source Software Peer Group Steering Committee for assembling some of the greatest hits along the timeline of security threats. The listing reflects a small portion of the onslaught of "things that go 'bump' in the night."

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