by Henry Jesus Jr. Lastimosa

Created on: June 27, 2010   Last Updated: June 30, 2010

As the internet has grown since I had my first taste of the internet back in college (yes college), different types of threats have evolved, ranging from viruses, malwares and phising sites that you really think are legitimate but instead they do something nasty to your system , if you are on a network environment well then your entire network. An unending fight or shall I say crusade to keep the internet safe from these types of attacks is on going, some professionals who use to be on the "darker side of computing" have been recruited to do reverse engineering and see how they really think and what is on their minds to at least put a stop to these types of threats.

As far as I can recall, when I started to work as a Technical Support Engineer for a prepaid Dial Up ISP, I am proud to say we were the one who caught the "I Love You" virus programmer, whose program is designed to steal passwords. A simple college student who came out of nowhere and decided to write a small program to do just that. As I recall it was in the year 2001, two years right after my graduation in college. At the eve when the virus spread, it started to spread and gave 40% of the virus to one of the leading ISPs, they were caught unaware about this, e-mail servers were working round the clock to keep up with the traffic, another 10% just about right were dropped to another ISP. Then the virus came to our system, right through our little 128K leased line from our carrier provider through our Cisco 2500 which was configured first hand with ACL's by our network admin that night. When the virus started to spread, our monitoring system went crazy and recorded high traffic on e-mails. Our Dial Up system was equipped with ASCENDMAX 6000, at the back panel of the system has 4 pairs of ethernet cables, from our routers and one straight to our PBX which runs through our MDF in the building. It was a very neat machine, pretty much it got me excited to work with the machine since it was my first time using it. ASCENDMAX 6000 has a very neat capability, it was capable of tracking Caller ID. The system can pick up the phone number (source) were the client was dialing from. It can keep track of the time the session started and the session ended, and it kept track of the AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting) which was done by Cisco 2600 using RADIUS and then gets dumped to a database.

 So off went the virus spreading like crazy on our network, our head Systems Administrator at our headquarters

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