ISP and Cyber Crime Security

Requirement

ISP AND CYBER CRIME SECURITY ASSIGNMENT

Solution

Introduction

An ISP or Internet Service Provider is an organization that provides services for using and accessing The Internet. The ISPs are organized in varying forms like the non-profit, commercial, privately owned or even community owned. The internet services that ISP provides include Internet transit, Usenet services, internet access, web hosting, and domain name registration and colocation. The ISP can help to address the issue when the computing devices are comprised due to malware or other malicious software.  
The malware or malicious software assist in cyber crimes as well as state-sponsored actors for stealing personal and sensitive information and data from devices and also from controlling them remotely for harmful or illegal purpose without the knowledge of the users. This malicious software and infections usually undertake the kind of activities that are harmful to the users of internet encompassing the spam distribution, phishing hosting and also identify theft identification.

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These compromised devices and computers have been aggregated into botnets or large devices used for assisting the spam and its mass distribution, phishing hosting, identify theft identification and website’s DDoS or distributed denial of services attacks. Various estimated have indicated that around 80% to 95% spans usually come from botnets and around 80-90% come from email (McMillan, 2009).
Various providers deal with the attacks of DDoS and other spamming activity which can adversely affect the availability as well performance of the network. The major consequences that arise from the malware infections can be classified as sensitive information or data from computing devices as well as personal data. This data can be utilized for various purposes like identity fraud enable banking and even extortion. It is quite obvious to recommend that the ISP of the user is responsible for assisting the end-users in cleaning their systems (Huang, Xianjun, & Whinston, 2007; Richards, 2007). The vehicles used by the hackers for conduction of illicit activities are known as compromised computers or bots or botnets. These bots or botnets are usually owned by the small business and Internet users unaware of the fact that their systems have been recruited.  

Discussions

ISPs observe the traffic that flows in and out of the network. The ISPs observe their traffic spikes which are related with the excessive malicious traffics (for example worms and spam bots cause it) along with the filter suspicious traffics. For instance, the suspicious traffic that enters the network can be stopped by ISP and in case, the traffic that originated from the network is malicious in nature. They can easily suspend their network access to their customers who are suspected of being botnets or bots and knowingly send the malicious traffic.
Alternatively, the user can be forced by their ISP for adopting to more security on their respective host computers. Various ISPs have been offering security services but mostly are not (Schneier, 2007a). The ISP-based solutions have been grouped into three categories on the basis of implementation scenarios that are aimed towards improvements of the security of their customers namely, fully external which provides the users with a security advice or any free product like the setup of firewall or providing antivirus software. Secondly is fully internal which implements higher filtering at the ISP level for addressing any suspicious activity like investigations of groups or users and lose sending them the privileges on the temporary basis. Lastly, the third one is termed as partially external where the ISP imposes policies on their users and then finally causes them to play a vital role towards prevention of unwanted traffic like ISP forces its customers for approving e-mails that are received from any unknown sender prior the email being accepted.  
Various customers have been provided with fully external services and related products. The ISPs have been providing firewalls, antivirus or any other anti-malware software at minimal fees or even free (when they purchase internet plan). This leads to the promotion of the higher use of security programs within their customers who are not able to purchase this software. In the United States, the ISPs have been offering fully internal services and products to the business users. These business users have always been wary of network security’s outsourcing (Gallaher et al., 2006; Rowe, 2007).
In small sites having Internet access that is provided via consumer-oriented, public ISP: when the site is compromised without the awareness of the system owner them the site can be used as a new foundation for the operation so as to launch the attacks that are against other websites. Somebody then files the complaints to the ISP, and the customers are then made aware of the compromise once ISP makes a call and finally disconnects the Internet service of the customers. When the ISP is convinced that the system was compromised and has eventually fixed the problem. The customer services of the customers are restored. In this interim, weeks can pass. The abuse team of ISP receives a report when any of their customers is having a computer which is actually a botnet and sends spam or any other related software that indicates the malware infection. When the ISPs are made aware of the compromised system or devices on their network. The most common that is taken includes telephone or SMS, or customer by email for contacting the customers. Some of the ISPs use both the means for contacting the customers. The only thing that should be taken into consideration is that the users must be easily able to verify that this contact from ISP is legitimate as compared to the other potential source of the malware infection. The ISP should further provide their new as well as exist, customers, the information regarding the protection against the cyber security risks. ISP is further responsible for supporting the operating systems of the customers. The ISP provides its customers with various educational material as to why the computer system was infected and this issue matters and also provides self-help information and data towards the problem that they seem to be having such as a Conficker-infected customer is given details and links to the website of the Conficker Working Group website. The customers are also told about the government sponsored clean-up schemes which the customers were entitled to use whenever they wished. 
ISP have a stake towards assisting their customers in setting up their computer in such a manner that it is functioning properly for the internet access as an extent of their responsibility. The ISP sells its vehicle to the internet. Many ISPs have been offering partially internal and partially external services to various human users and for small business users. The customers are focused down by Earthlink for approving all their new incoming message even before the messages have been accessed.
If the customers do not achieve must success with the tools and assistance provided to them, then a technician is made to visit the customer's house and clean their systems for them. The customers are charged for this service so as to consider the prevention of the moral hazard of the consumers concluding that the no prevention is required. However, the charge is quite minimal as the government pays for the rest of the services.
While installation of anti-virus software the customers are encouraged to follow best practices and to ensure that all their software are entirely up-to-date. The consumers would also be given an advice of changing their online passwords and further are advised to keep a check on credit and bank cards statement. 
If the whole procedure works as mentioned above, then it would be quite beneficial. There would be the reduction of the infected computers and other systems albeit this act would not be beneficial on an international scale. Furthermore, there will be fewer cases of citizen’s data loss- the malware commonly involves keylogger. Therefore, how quickly the computer gets cleaned up, therefore, less likely the passwords is going to reach to the criminals and similarly, the time window for exploiting them would become smaller. Therefore, a rapid and painless correction of all the malware infection prevents the loss of confidence for usage of internet. Various government and their organizations are viewing the internet as a method for cutting down the time and cost expense while communicating with the citizens and for benefiting the economy to have an online population. Therefore, it is quite critical to have high confidence on The Internet for tempting the people to come online and to keep them engaged there.  And if the scheme is highly effective than the other nations must also look for implementing their own digitalized version so that the early adopters can find that their international standing has enhanced. 
The ISPs and the intermediaries should have some responsibility for maintaining the Internet. They must maintain all the records that are stored in the digital address of everyone entering their respective websites. This can help to allow law enforcement so as to trace all the individuals who engage themselves in kind sort of illegality on the internet (USMAN, 2013).
Hence, it is considered that the ISPs have acquired a high position of protecting their customers as they easily connect to all the internet users. Additionally, they have acquired the equipment and the expertise for monitoring as well as blocking any illegal or unauthorized access. In 2010, a study that was conducted in MAAWG suggested that around 65% of the users believe that the ESPs and ISPs are essential for mitigating the spread of computer malware, spam or any fraudulent emails spyware which was followed by 54% claiming antivirus vendors and the users with 48% for prevention of the same. 

Further, the most important aspect of ISP in the case of internet security involve a secured network design of ISP as a compromised network design might lead to disruptions in the services for thousands of users. Further on the system being too heavy the legitimate customers are bound to be upset and ultimately leave making ISP lose its income eventually. If the ISP-based securities are offered to the customers, then it offers an innovative source of revenue and simultaneously gains the loyalty of its customers.
Various ISPs have been providing additional techniques for strengthening the security of their network like blackhole routing, sinkholes, backscatter trace back and finally the traffic scrubbing.

  1. Blackhole routing: It is a very common method to discard all the packets that are being sent to a particular destination when the destination’s traffic flow is known. The network administrations are responsible for identifying the host under attack and then it routes the traffic that was destined for this host to Null0 through the creation of a static host route.  

  2. Sinkholes: The ISP security sinkholes are a group of techniques that uses routing protocols as their security tool. Sinkholes have been facilitating the detection of malware virus and worms that can generate packets to any unknown address. It is very critical to select address block’s size that the sinkhole is going to accept as sinkhole attracts the junk traffic on the basis of the size of IP blocks. 

  3. Backscatter Traceback: This technique is highly useful in case of spoofed attacks where the source address has been used by the attackers from their private IP address. 

  4. Traffic Scrubbing: This technique allows to differentiate between the legitimate traffic from the traffic of the attackers that derives either from the naive sources or any malicious source. This method is implemented in the case of DDoS attack. 

In the nutshell, the market trends have been moving towards the ISPs that provide higher security to their customers and various type of information is needed for higher motivation and more well-known ISP security provisioning.

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References

  • McMillan, R. (2009). 90 Percent of E-mail Is Spam, Symantec Says. PCWorld. Retrieved 13 May 2016, from http://www.pcworld.com/article/165533/article.html

  • Huang, Y., Geng, X., & Whinston, A. (2007). Defeating DDoS attacks by fixing the incentive chain. ACM Trans. Inter. Tech., 7(1), 5-es. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1189740.1189745

  • Schneier, B. (2007). Home Users: A Public Health Problem? - Schneier on Security. Schneier.com. Retrieved 13 May 2016, from https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/home_users_a_pu.html

  • Gallaher, M., Rowe, B., Rogozhin, A., & Link, A. (2006, April). Economic analysis of cyber

  • security and private sector investment decisions. Report prepared for the U.S. Department of

  • Homeland Security. Research Triangle Park, NC: RTI International.

  • Rowe, B. (2007). Will outsourcing IT security lead to a higher social level of security?

  • 2007 Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. Retrieved April 24, 2009, at

  • http://weis2007.econinfosec.org/papers/47.pdf.

  • USMAN, S. (2013). A REVIEW OF RESPONSIBILITIES OF INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS TOWARD THEIR CUSTOMERS’ NETWORK SECURITY. Journal Of Theoretical And Applied Information Technology, 49(1).

  • Service Provider Security. (2004). Cisco. Retrieved 13 May 2016, from http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/security-center/service-provider-infrastructure-security.html

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