How you would attempt to keep a business from suffering a similar attack - Essay Example

Key words Packet attack; juveniles; distributed denial of service (DDoS) What was Learned There is a lot that I have learned from the attack on grc.com. First of all, this attack was carried out by a 13 year old! He mentioned that together with his friends, he decided to attack the website following a “disparaging” remark that was made by the website in its newsgroup. Let me go back to my point. The logic here is not whether the attack was carried out by a group or an individual, but that a 13 year old was at the mastermind of the attack and even bragged about it.

What I learned from this is that “internet terrorism” is no longer a preserve of college students or people aged 16 and above (as previously thought). Maybe the 13 year old kid and his friends are very good at computers, but that is also beside the point. The fact that they took time to learn how to design and launch packet attacks is very worrying indeed and must be looked into. Overall, what I learned from this is that there is a new breed of hackers in town. These new breed is aggressive, smart and, surprisingly, unapologetic.

This calls for a revision of cyber terrorism combat strategies and techniques. What is also clear from the attack is that law enforcement agencies and authorities are not only ill-prepared but also poorly augmented to deal with the new class of hackers. For instance, the author reveals that when he approached the FBI after establishing that the individual who masterminded the attack was a 13 year old, he was met with the following responses: a) Until the damages done amounted to $5,000, no crime had been committed.

That is the law. b) Even if the damages done amounted to $5,000 and a crime was deemed to have been committed, their staffs were not only swamped but also overloaded with cases concerning firms that had incurred huge monetary losses caused by internet/cyber crime. c) Considering that the chief suspect was just 13 years old, there was not much that could be done to him, even if the amount of evidence confirmed that the attacks were planned and orchestrated by him. The most that could happen was a chat between some agents and his parents at his place of residence.

In essence, his youth gave him an impenetrable armor. This was a major discouragement of the costs likely to be incurred from any kind of investigation. These points prove my earlier assertion that law enforcement authorities and agencies (in this case the FBI) are not only ill-equipped but also poorly augmented to fight cybercrime that is perpetrated by juveniles. How I would Attempt to keep a Business from Suffering a similar Attack I would institute a number of effective measures to combat attacks similar to the one that was directed at grc.com. These measures include the following: Developing effective commands that will counter the possibility of suffering a similar attack.

This will work by helping businesses verify that their systems are not infected by any of the existing IRC Zombie/Bots. Since all the IRC Zombie/Bots usually trigger and maintain static links to remote IRC chat servers anytime the host computer is connected to the internet (Yang & Wanlei 22). An active link/connection can be detected using the following command; netstat –an | find “:6667”. Detection will pave way for termination. Encouraging businesses and firms to perform regular tests and checks that allow them to detect and consequently terminate harmful connections. Since IRC