Network Security

Network Security
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Cyber warfare is a form of information war deliberately aimed at weakening a policy or corporation through subversion, obstruction, disruption or destruction. Cyber warfare targets and attempts to damage information networks and digital infrastructure through computer viruses and denial of service attacks. Cyber warfare can also be characterized by the practice of obtaining information without the permission of the owner, typically by governments to get political and military information by applying cracking techniques and malicious software. This is carried out purely for the purpose of gaining a strategic advantage and for physiological, political and physical subversion activities (Poroshyn, 2014). Stuxnet is a worm that came to the limelight in 2010, was designed to attack industrial programmable logic controllers, it is believed to have three models: a worm that that executes all routines related to the primary payload of attack, a link file that automatically runs the propagated copies of the worm and finally a rootkit component responsible for hiding all malicious files and processes thereby inhibiting any detection of Stuxnet (Rebane, 2011). Contrary to expectations Stuxnet was not about industrial spying, it didn’t steal, destroy or erase processed or raw data. This worm was truly an unprecedentedly masterful and malicious piece of code. Its goal was to manipulate a military target physically. It was carefully designed to infect any windows PC it would get however it was much pickier on controllers. A controller program also known as ladder logic operates purely on physics whereas a computer program specifically operates on information (Rebane, 2011). Stuxnet targeted Siemens controllers; it went through a rigorous and thorough process of fingerprinting to ascertain its accuracy. The process included checking model numbers, configuration details and more interesting it downloaded a program code from the said controller to check if i...