Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies

By : Tim Rains
Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies

By: Tim Rains

Overview of this book

After scrutinizing numerous cybersecurity strategies, Microsoft’s former Global Chief Security Advisor in this book helps you understand the efficacy of popular cybersecurity strategies and more. Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies offers an unprecedented long-term view of the global threat landscape by examining the twenty-year trend in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, nearly a decade of regional differences in malware infections, the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how global malware has evolved. This will give you further perspectives into malware protection for your organization. It also examines internet-based threats that CISOs should be aware of. The book will provide you with an evaluation of the various cybersecurity strategies that have ultimately failed over the past twenty years, along with one or two that have actually worked. It will help executives and security and compliance professionals understand how cloud computing is a game changer for them. By the end of this book, you will know how to measure the effectiveness of your organization’s cybersecurity strategy and the efficacy of the vendors you employ to help you protect your organization and yourself.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
9
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10
Index

Introduction

In 2003, when I worked on Microsoft's customer-facing incident response team, we began finding user mode rootkits on compromised systems with some regularity, so much so that one of our best engineers built a tool that could find user mode rootkits that were hiding from Windows. A user mode rootkit runs like any other application that a normal user would run, but it hides itself. Then, one day, we received a call from a Microsoft support engineer who was helping troubleshoot an issue that a customer had on an Exchange email server. The symptom of the problem was that once every few days, the server would blue screen. The support engineer couldn't figure out why and was doing a remote debug session, trying to find the code that caused the server to blue screen. It took weeks, but once he found the code responsible for the blue screen, he couldn't explain what the code was, nor how it was installed on the server. This is when he called us for help.

When...