Rootkits and Mail Bombs

An Explanation of Root Kits and Mail Bombs is show below

Mail Bombs- these generally send hundreds of emails to one address in an attemp to crash the server,easy to design but are easily to filter thro spam filters.A form of mail-bombing popular in Russia is called a ZIP bomb. This is a slightly different form of denial of service attack against a computer system's (mail server). After most commercial mail servers began checking mail with anti-virus software and filtering certain malicious file types, trojan horse viruses tried to send themselves compressed into archives, such as ZIP, RAR or 7-Zip. Mail server software was then configured to unpack archives and check their contents as well. That gave black hats the idea to compose a "bomb" consisting of an enormous text file, containing, for example, only the letter z repeated millions of times. Such a file compresses into a relatively small archive, but its unpacking (especially by early versions of mail servers) would use a high amount of processing power, RAM and swap space, which could result in denial of service. Modern mail server computers usually have sufficient intelligence to recognize such attacks as well as sufficient processing power and memory space to process such attachments without interruption of service, though some are still susceptible to this technique if the ZIP bomb is mass-mailed.




Rootkits(Backdoor)-The term rootkit or root kit originally referred to a maliciously modified set of administrative tools for a Unix-like operating system. If an intruder could replace the standard administrative tools on a system with a rootkit, the modified tools would give the intruder administrative control over the system while concealing his activities from the legitimate system administrator. The earliest known rootkit was written ca. 1990 by Lane Davis and Riley Dake for SunOS 4.1.1. There was an earlier, quite famous, exploit equivalent to a rootkit which was perpetrated by Ken Thompson of Bell Labs against a Naval Laboratory in California to win a bet. Thompson subverted the C compiler in a distribution of Unix to the Lab.
Rootkits were so named because they allowed an intruder to become a root user (ie, the system administrator) of a Unix system. Since then, similar software has been developed for other operating systems, and the term rootkit has been broadened to include any software that surreptitiously alters an operating system so that an unauthorized user can take arbitrary control of the system. .
Rootkits became much better known in 2005, when Sony BMG caused a scandal by including rootkit software on music CDs which altered the Windows OS to allow access to anyone aware of the rootkit's installation. Supposedly, this was done to enforce copy protection of the music on the CDs.