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Attacks- The Victim And The Accused.

© Mayur Kamat

To know more about Internet Security, we have study the mentality of people who try breach this security. Here, the psychoanalysis of human mind comes into picture. In this article, we try to study the origin of an attack and the type of people who are responsible for the insecurity prevailing on the net.

Origin Of Attack

Years ago, many attacks originated from universities because that is where the Internet access came from. Most crackers were youngsters who had no other easy means of accessing the Internet. This naturally influenced not only the origin of the attack but also the time during which the attack happened. Also, real TCP/IP was not available as an option in the old days.

Today the situation is entirely different. Crackers can crack your network from their home, office, or vehicle. However, there are some constants. For instance, serious crackers do not generally use providers such as America Online, Prodigy, or Microsoft Network. One reason for this is that these providers will roll over a hacker or cracker to the authorities at the drop of a hat. The suspect may not have even done anything wrong . Ironically, big providers allow spammers to pummel the Internet with largely unwanted advertising.

Furthermore, these providers do not offer a UNIX shell environment in addition to garden-variety PPP. A shell account can facilitate many actions that are otherwise more difficult to undertake. System tools available that can provide increased functionality include the various shells, Perl, AWK, SED, C, C++, and a handful of system commands (showmount is one; rusers is another).

So the picture of a typical cracker is developing: This is a person who works late at night, who is armed with a UNIX or an NT box and advanced tools, and, with all likelihood, is using a local provider.

What Are The Requisites For A Successful Cracker?

The typical cracker can probably be described by at least three qualities in the following profile:

• Can code in C, C++, or Perl--These are general requirements, because many of the baseline security tools are written in one or more of these languages. At minimum, the cracker must be able to properly interpret, compile, and execute the code. More-advanced crackers can take code not expressly written for a particular platform and port it to their own. 
  
• Has an in-depth knowledge of TCP/IP--No competent cracker can get along without this requirement. At minimum, a cracker must know how the Internet works. This knowledge must necessarily go deeper than just what it takes to

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