-: Common Delivery Methods.
There are a myriad of ways that your computer
can get infected with malware.
But by far, the most common ones come from software,
messaging, and media.
Software and messaging are things like email programs,
peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent, FTP servers,
and pretty much any other way that we communicate
from one computer to another.
When I'm talking about media,
we're talking about things like CDs and DVDs,
USB thumb drives, external hard drives,
tape backups, and even old school floppy disks.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
Jason, I'm smart enough not to pick up
some USB drive off the ground
and take some disks that I don't know where they came from,
and slide it into my work computer.
But guess what?
This stuff happens every single day.
Often it's because our human nature is to be nice,
and we're trusting and we want to be helpful to people.
So somebody comes over to your cubicle with a USB drive
and says, hey I got three minutes
before I got to give this presentation.
Can you please print out my slide deck for me?
Will you take that and put it in your drive?
Well, you might.
A lot of people do.
And when they do that, there could be malware
on that USB drive and we just infected the network.
So, beyond plugging in a USB drive
or a CD that you found on the floor,
what's another place that you can get infected from?
Well, there's a thing known as a watering hole.
But before we talk about it in computers,
let's talk about a watering hole in the real world.
If you go to Africa, there's a lot of desert there,
and the animals need water.
And so when they find a lake or an oasis,
the animals will gather there and they'll drink the water,
and then they'll go off
and they'll do what animals do all day.
And eventually they'll come back
because they need more water again.
And they'll do this time and time again.
So watering holes are a place that people have to return to,
or in this case, animals.
Now, what does this have to do with your business
and with computers?
Well, it's the exact same concept.
There's a lot of us who have routine habits,
where we do the same thing day in and day out.
And those places that we go are our watering holes.
For example, every morning my wife gets up,
she gets her cup of coffee, she logs into Facebook
and she starts scrolling her feed.
For her, that would be a watering hole.
It's something she goes to every single day.
Are there those type of things inside your business?
Maybe there's a supplier that you go to every single day
to check your invoices.
Well, if you think about this,
an attacker can figure out where that website is
that you go to every day.
And if they can go and attack that company
and embed viruses or malware into their website,
when you go to the website to do regular work,
like pulling your invoices,
you can also be pulling that virus.
So their website now becomes a watering hole for malware.
And the malware that sits there behind that website
will get potential victims.
Now, if they got your supplier
and they got all the people who visit the supplier,
they can ultimately get you too.
There are lots of things
that can create watering holes for us.
There's an automated toolkit called an exploit kit
that makes this really easy to do as an attacker.
Fortunately for us, a lot of websites
that are watering holes and places
that we go every single day, are very well secured.
If you think of a place like Facebook or Google,
they have teams of cyber security experts
working to keep their site up and keep it safe.
Unfortunately for us though,
attackers are really smart people.
And if they know that you go to Facebook all the time,
they're going to try to figure out a way to still trick you.
And they might do something that's known as Typosquatting.
I have an example here on the screen.
My website is DionTraining.com.
Now, if you look at the one on the bottom,
it says DionTrainings.com.
Now I have a happy face and a sad face, why is that?
Well, the happy face is on our official website,
DionTraining.com.
That's the one that we own, that's the good site.
That's the site that is secure and ready to go.
I don't own DionTrainings.com,
but if an attacker was to try to spoof you,
they might buy DionTrainings.com
thinking that you might add an extra S
and have a typo at the end of my domain name
when you're trying to go and log in to your course.
And if they have control of that site,
they might clone it to look like my site.
And they might place malware there
and then use that as a watering hole
to try to go after all of my students.
Now, that's just the example of how watering holes work
in an effective way around businesses.
So, maybe you don't have Facebook, you have Facebooks.
Maybe you have something that is spelled just a little off,
like Yahoo with three O's.
That's the idea of a Typosquatting.
And then you can have a website behind it
that is a watering hole for the attack.