Computer security assignment: Cyber Threats & Encryption

Computer Security Assignment: Cyber Threats & Encryption

Question

Task: Your computer security assignment must address the following points:
1. Based on your personal experiences or those of someone you know (you may have to interview other students or a friend), write a paragraph regarding a computer attack that occurred.

When did it happen and what was the attack?
What type of damage did it inflict?
List the reason or reasons you think that the attack was successful.
How was the computer fixed after the attack?
What could have prevented it?

1. Describe onion router and its purposes. Download onion router and using wireshark capture packets coming out of onion router when you visit a website. What path are the packets taking to go out of the network?

2. Download “smb3-aes-128-ccm.pcap” from the following link https://wiki.wireshark.org/SampleCaptures#SMB3_encryption. Analyse the pcap file using wireshark and list down all information you can read from the packets.

3. Download PGP (freeware or paid) and try to encrypt an email using someone's public key. Describe other functions that you can do with PGP

4. Download any steganography software and demonstrate hiding a 500kB document in the software–
5. Password cracking : Create a digest on a password and then crack it with an online cracking website to demonstrate the speed of cracking passwords. You can create 10 different passwords and see how those passwords could be cracked.

Note : The first step is to use a hash algorithm to create a password digest. Use your web browser to go towww.fileformat.info/tool/hash.htm. You can use https://crackstation.net/ to check the password cracking time.

6. QR code has different vulnerabilities and it could easily exploit. With the help of www.qrstuff.com explain how an attacker could use a QR code to direct a victim to a malicious website?

Answer

Computer Attack – Malware Attack
My computer was infected with a malware/spyware after I downloaded an unsolicited email and executed the attachment. It installed malicious addons and malwares in my PC. Every time, I would try to load a site, it would redirect me to some random site.

Could’ve simply been prevented by:
a) Not downloading the attachment from the unsolicited email (Bahtiyar, 2016). This would have made sure that the malware was not downloaded on my system.

b) Executing the attachment in a Sandbox environment: such as a Virtual Machine. The malware would have been identified and the alerts would have been issued to maintain the security.

c) Should have kept my Antivirus as well as my Browser updated to the latest versions. This would have led to the effective avoidance of the issue.

Onion Router and its Purpose
Onion Router, also referred as the Tor Browser is the software as well as the network that makes sure that the anonymity of the user is maintained on the Internet. The onion routing programs are developed on the basis of the extensive research and development of the anonymous communication protocols(Pei and Oida, 2020). The primary focus has been kept on the low-latency network systems and channels that can avoid the network security issues, such as eavesdropping and other forms of man in the middle attacks. The primary purpose is to maintain and promote the security of the network and the information sets. The logical and physical location of the service is kept hidden that leads to the resistance from the denial of service, distributed denial of service, and other network security attacks(Dhankani et al., 2015). I downloaded the default Tor Browser for Windows from the Torproject.org and also installed and configured Wireshark on my computer. Thereafter, I opened the Torbrowser and visited Google.com and captured and filtered the following traffic as displayed below in the screenshot.