Info Security

7 Pages 1673 Words

ere a person working in the bank will “hack” into the system and change how the system handles interest so that fractions of a cent are transferred into an account of that intruder. Active intruders are also sometimes responsible for denial of service attacks. Recently, there was an attack on the 13 DNS servers that store all of the name information for the Internet. Although not enough servers were affected to the point that the traffic on the Internet suffered, this was definitely a malicious attack to disrupt global communications.
There are several ways to prevent crackers from doing harm to or reading data. This technology is known as cryptography. The basics behind cryptography is to change how something appears so others cannot see what it is. Changing plaintext to ciphertext using monoalphabetic substitution is an example of this.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
to
qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm

A more sophisticated way of encrypting data is known as public key encryption. This uses a set of two keys, a public key (that is published) and a private key (that is kept secret). The data is encrypted using the public key (that is known to everyone) and decrypted by the private key...