ISC Updated SSCP Exam Questions and Answers by milan

While a masquerading attack can be considered a type of social engineering, the Melissa and ILOVEYOU viruses are examples of masquerading attacks, even if it may cause some kind of denial of service due to the web server being flooded with messages. In this case, the receiver confidently opens a message coming from a trusted individual, only to find that the message was sent using the trusted party's identity.

Source: HARRIS, Shon, All-In-One CISSP Certification Exam Guide, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2002, Chapter 10: Law, Investigation, and Ethics (page 650).

As script kiddies are low to moderately skilled hackers using available scripts and tools to easily launch attacks against victims.

The other answers are incorrect because :

Black hats is incorrect as they are malicious , skilled hackers.

White hats is incorrect as they are security professionals.

Phreakers is incorrect as they are telephone/PBX (private branch exchange) hackers.

Reference : Shon Harris AIO v3 , Chapter 12: Operations security , Page : 830

XSS or Cross-Site Scripting is a threat to web applications where malicious code is placed on a website that attacks the use using their existing authenticated session status.

Cross-Site Scripting attacks are a type of injection problem, in which malicious scripts are injected into the otherwise benign and trusted web sites. Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks occur when an attacker uses a web application to send malicious code, generally in the form of a browser side script, to a different end user. Flaws that allow these attacks to succeed are quite widespread and occur anywhere a web application uses input from a user in the output it generates without validating or encoding it.

An attacker can use XSS to send a malicious script to an unsuspecting user. The end user’s browser has no way to know that the script should not be trusted, and will execute the script. Because it thinks the script came from a trusted source, the malicious script can access any cookies, session tokens, or other sensitive information retained by your browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.

Mitigation:

Configure your IPS - Intrusion Prevention System to detect and suppress this traffic.

Input Validation on the web application to normalize inputted data.

Set web apps to bind session cookies to the IP Address of the legitimate user and only permit that IP Address to use that cookie.

See the XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Prevention Cheat Sheet

See the Abridged XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet

See the DOM based XSS Prevention Cheat Sheet

See the OWASP Development Guide article on Phishing.

See the OWASP Development Guide article on Data Validation.

The following answers are incorrect:

Intrusion Detection Systems: Sorry. IDS Systems aren't usually the target of XSS attacks but a properly-configured IDS/IPS can "detect and report on malicious string and suppress the TCP connection in an attempt to mitigate the threat.

Firewalls: Sorry. Firewalls aren't usually the target of XSS attacks.

DNS Servers: Same as above, DNS Servers aren't usually targeted in XSS attacks but they play a key role in the domain name resolution in the XSS attack process.

The following reference(s) was used to create this question:

CCCure Holistic Security+ CBT and Curriculum

and

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-site_Scripting_%28XSS%29

Computer worms are also known as Network Mobile Code, or a virus-like bit of code that can replicate itself over a network, infecting adjacent computers.

A computer worm is a standalone malware computer program that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. Often, it uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security failures on the target computer to access it. Unlike a computer virus, it does not need to attach itself to an existing program. Worms almost always cause at least some harm to the network, even if only by consuming bandwidth, whereas viruses almost always corrupt or modify files on a targeted computer.

A notable example is the SQL Slammer computer worm that spread globally in ten minutes on January 25, 2003. I myself came to work that day as a software tester and found all my SQL servers infected and actively trying to infect other computers on the test network.

A patch had been released a year prior by Microsoft and if systems were not patched and exposed to a 376 byte UDP packet from an infected host then system would become compromised.

Ordinarily, infected computers are not to be trusted and must be rebuilt from scratch but the vulnerability could be mitigated by replacing a single vulnerable dll called sqlsort.dll.

Replacing that with the patched version completely disabled the worm which really illustrates to us the importance of actively patching our systems against such network mobile code.

The following answers are incorrect:

- Rootkit: Sorry, this isn't correct because a rootkit isn't ordinarily classified as network mobile code like a worm is. This isn't to say that a rootkit couldn't be included in a worm, just that a rootkit isn't usually classified like a worm. A rootkit is a stealthy type of software, typically malicious, designed to hide the existence of certain processes or programs from normal methods of detection and enable continued privileged access to a computer. The term rootkit is a concatenation of "root" (the traditional name of the privileged account on Unix operating systems) and the word "kit" (which refers to the software components that implement the tool). The term "rootkit" has negative connotations through its association with malware.

- Adware: Incorrect answer. Sorry but adware isn't usually classified as a worm. Adware, or advertising-supported software, is any software package which automatically renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author. The advertisements may be in the user interface of the software or on a screen presented to the user during the installation process. The functions may be designed to analyze which Internet sites the user visits and to present advertising pertinent to the types of goods or services featured there. The term is sometimes used to refer to software that displays unwanted advertisements.

- Logic Bomb: Logic bombs like adware or rootkits could be spread by worms if they exploit the right service and gain root or admin access on a computer.

The following reference(s) was used to create this question:

The CCCure CompTIA Holistic Security+ Tutorial and CBT

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootkit

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adware