{"id":25854,"date":"2019-03-18T11:45:10","date_gmt":"2019-03-18T09:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.getsmarter.com\/blog\/?p=25854"},"modified":"2023-08-10T10:51:42","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T08:51:42","slug":"how-to-detect-a-cyberattack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getsmarter.com\/blog\/how-to-detect-a-cyberattack\/","title":{"rendered":"Detecting Cyberattacks Through the Ever-evolving Cybersecurity Industry"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cybersecurity has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s.1<\/sup> In the beginning, hackers were generally considered a nuisance, and their hacks \u2013 which were pretty limited in terms of their scope \u2013 were designed more to cause trouble than harm.<\/p>\n

When the internet began to take centre stage to businesses, and our lives \u2013 each new generation experiences increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks, and this brings about greater damage. The cybersecurity market and industry have had to evolve to effectively counter these attacks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It all started here<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It is generally accepted that the first created virus was called \u2018The Creeper\u2019, which infected \u2018Arpanet\u2019 \u2013 the foundation of the internet \u2013 in 1971.2<\/sup> However, computer viruses and worms were predicted as early as 1949 by the mathematician John von Neumann, in his paper \u2018Theory and Organisation of Complicated Automata,\u2019 in which he proposed that a computer programme could reproduce.3<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The Creeper\u2019, was designed by Bob Thomas, an engineer who worked at BBN. The same company where email inventor, Ray Tomlinson worked. It wasn\u2019t created to be malicious. In fact, infected machines would simply show the message, “I’m the creeper: catch me if you can,” but no damage was inflicted. In response to \u2018The Creeper\u2019s\u2019 blatant challenge, the first antivirus software was created, know as \u2018The Reaper\u2019. It was also a self-replicating programme, which spread through the system in much the same way as \u2018The Creeper\u2019, and removed the offending virus from infected computers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The term \u2018computer virus\u2019 was coined in the early 1980s when Fred Cohen, a PhD student at the University of Southern California, came up with the idea of using self-replicating software that spreads by attaching itself to existing programmes in order to attack the security of multi-user computing systems.4 <\/sup>When he showed his idea to Len Adleman, his thesis advisor, Adleman, remarked on how similar this principle is to a biological virus that uses the resources of the host cell it attacks to reproduce itself. The term \u2018computer virus\u2019 was born.5<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Morris worm creates huge impact<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Morris worm was released from an MIT<\/a> computer by graduate student, Robert Tappan Morris at Cornell University in November 19886.<\/sup> It spread to internet-connected computers running the BSD variant of UNIX. Designed to be undetectable, a design flaw led it to create far more copies of itself than Morris estimated, resulting in the drastic over-taxing of all the computers it infected. This made it easy to detect, and made it possible to repair the back doors that it exploited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he showed his idea to Len Adleman, his thesis advisor, Adleman, remarked on how similar this principle is to a biological virus that uses the resources of the host cell it attacks to reproduce itself. The term \u2018computer virus\u2019 was born.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Morris worm was not intended to be destructive, however, it caused computers to slow and buckle under the weight of unnecessary processing. The reason for Morris creating the worm is unclear; some speculate that the release was either premature or accidental.7<\/sup> Regardless, the worm brought about two events that have become a major focus for those in IT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, Morris became the first person to be tried under the new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, 18 U.S.C., section 1030(a<\/em>)(5)(A).8<\/sup> Morris was tried, convicted and sentenced to three years of probation,
400 hours of community service, a fine of $10,050, and the costs of his supervision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Secondly, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US. Their role was to coordinate information and responses to computer vulnerabilities, risks, and security.9<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The evolution of viruses in applications, malware and bots <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The early 2000s marked the rise of viruses being spread through applications (apps) \u2013 the third generation of malicious cyberattacks<\/strong>. Defensive strategies were evolving to combat cybersecurity attacks, but not as fast as the viruses were growing. What followed was the onset of malware, zero-day threats, bots, and other forms of attacks.<\/p>\n

These gave rise to the following defensive strategies:<\/p>\n