Computer Security Questions and Answers

Answer: D

Correct answer: To hide malicious activity on the network.

Traffic sent through a proxy appears to come from the proxy, so the attacker's own address does not appear in the target's logs. Chaining several proxies makes tracing back harder still.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Stealth virus

A stealth virus is built to conceal itself - intercepting the calls antivirus software makes so that infected files appear unchanged in size and content. Polymorphism also frustrates detection, but by changing the virus's own appearance rather than by hiding the evidence of infection.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Spam

Hackers, viruses and worms each threaten security directly. Spam is unsolicited advertising - a nuisance, and often the vehicle for the others, but not in itself a security threat.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Polymorphic Virus

A polymorphic virus encrypts itself with a different key each time it copies itself, so every copy does the same thing while having a different bit pattern. That is what defeats signature-based scanning, which looks for a fixed sequence of bytes.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Vital Information Resource Under Siege

The usual expansion is Vital Information Resource Under Siege. It is a backronym invented after the fact - the word came from biology - but it is the one these questions expect.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Malware

Malware is short for malicious software. The other three are invented words.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Both i and ii

Both statements are true, and for the same reason: a macro virus is written in the macro language of an application, not in machine code. So it infects documents rather than executables, and it runs wherever the application runs, whatever the operating system underneath.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Phishing scams

Phishing means impersonating a bank, a service or a colleague in order to persuade the victim to hand over passwords or card details. Spyware takes information without asking rather than by asking under a false name, and phishing trips is not a term.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Ignorance

Trojans, adware and crackers all come from outside the organisation. Ignorance is an internal weakness - a user who does not know what not to click - which is what makes it the odd one out.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Virus

Code Red was a worm that attacked Microsoft IIS web servers in 2001, and in the loose usage of these questions it is classed as a virus - that is, as malicious code rather than as any kind of application.