An unknown individual launches a series of attacks against the Web sites of Prime Sales Corporation. The attacks significantly slow the sites, leading to $100 million in damage in terms of lost work time, lost revenue, site repair costs, and other

Question

expenses. The attacker does not intend to profit from the onslaught and in fact does not realize any financial benefit from the effects. How is this attack most likely orchestrated? Who is most likely to engage in this act—that is, whose habits and limitations are clearly suited to such conduct—and why?

Answer 1

The perpetrator in this question likely committed the attack through hacking—using one computer to break into another. The hacker may have appropriated a large number of computers without their owners' knowledge. Each computer might have become a bot, together constituting a botnet, through which the hacker could secretly install programs to forward transmissions to even more computers. The hacker might then have installed other malware, or other programs harmful to computers. This might have consisted of a worm, which could reproduce and transfer itself to other computers, or a virus, which could reproduce itself but could not transfer without being attached to an infected file. These programs might have been uploaded to Web sites based anywhere in the world.