Week 9 Summary

What is Malware?

Malware is a software that makes your computer do undesirable things, but are desirable to malicious actors. Malware can provide a backdoor or reverse shell of your computer to the bad guys, install keyloggers to capture passwords or sensitive information. Hackers could also charge a fee to fix the computer that they infected as a ransom. Malware can infect phones and tablets as well as all types of operating systems. Malware can be created by anyone from script kiddies to experts who write their own code to create the malware from scratch. Malware can reach your computer in the form of social engineering, client side attacks, phishing, or stenography.

Viruses

Malware is a blanket term that can include viruses, worms, trojans, bots, or rootkits. These tools are all malicious tools that can control your computer to the whims of a remote controller many miles away with unauthorized access. When malware is detected on your system, the recommended SANS incident response plan is to prepare a plan, identify when a an incident has occurred, contain and get rid of the threat, recover systems back to normal, and learn from the past to help prevent breaches in the future, or to build a better response plan.

News Story:
Facebook will alert you if a government entity is trying to hack your account
http://qz.com/528169/facebook-will-now-tell-you-if-a-state-government-is-hacking-your-account/