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* INTRODUCTION *
It's a beautiful warm, sunny afternoon in your typical suburban neighborhood. Joe, a boy almost sixteen years old, looks out of his bedroom window to see a man and women walking their dog. A few yards up the street he can just make out a group of kids his age coming his way. Suddenly, Joe jumps up in excitement...not to go join the kids for a game of football like I used to do at his age...no, Joe just gained root on his third system this week. With a few keystrokes, he installs a trojan, covers his tracks, and disconnects. "I'll play with that after dinner," he thinks to himself.
If this seems like an unlikely scenario to you, then you should read on. Consider all of your online activity...shopping, banking, memberships...whatever it may be. Where is all of your very personal information stored? Chances are it's on a system like the one young Joey just cracked.
A vast majority of the civilized world is or will be, in some way, connected to a network. Unless the network is completely isolated, any machine connected to that network is a potential target. If you are thinking to yourself, "you can just set up a firewall," then you have already lost. There is an ongoing battle between security experts and would-be crackers, on the one end to defend networks and systems, and on the other end to compromise them. There is no silver bullet; as technology changes, so do the security measures and exploits. The key is to try to stay ahead of the game and take all known security measures to make it harder for people like Joe.
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