It's no secret that a mature sense of ethics is something a person develops over time. Parents are supposed to exercise authority over their children because the children are not expected to know how to make certain decisions for them. We have a juvenile court system separate from the adult criminal court system because we believe that a young person is not capable of criminal intent in the same sense that an adult is capable of it.

Compare a bunch of adolescents breaking into a computer system with another bunch of kids hot-wiring a car for a joyride. The latter would probably argue, with complete sincerity, that they were doing no harm, because the owner of the car recovered his property afterward. They didn't keep or sell it. It's a "naughty" prank to borrow someone's property in that way, but not really serious.

A variation on the basic DoS attack is the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is launched from a variety of sites, making it more difficult to detect and block. DDoS attacks are considerably harder to combat because blocking a single IP address or network will not stop them. The traffic can derive from hundreds or even thousands of individual systems; sometimes the users are not even aware that their computers are part of the attack. This can be attained by planting a program on a system as part of a virus. To accomplish a DDoS, an attacker creates a collection of machines:

To take positive steps toward this goal requires action on two fronts, access to technology and access to ideas. The latter requires training high school teachers who are themselves qualified computer programmers. In the long run, this means paying teachers salaries competitive with industry standards. That's a matter for government action. Another approach may be to promote active cooperation between university computer science departments and high schools. Perhaps college faculty and graduate students could contribute some of their time to the local high schools. (This is not a new idea; outside experts are donating time to secondary schools to help teach other areas of science. Such partnership brings its own problems, because both the goals and the techniques of college teaching are different from those of high school teaching. Still, this collaboration has sometimes been fruitful.)

The attacker then puts this collection to work. Through port scanning software, the attacker obtains a list of broadcasters and hosts to which he/she can gain root privileges. The attacker then installs daemon software on these machines, usually many at one time through batch processes. This software usually runs as an automated process, which conceals its presence from machine owners.

Even more dangerous than overwhelming a system with legitimate requests is flooding a system with requests falsified in such a way that the server expends more resources trying to validate or complete connections than it would setting up legitimate connections. One well-known attack of this type is the SYN flood. A SYN (SYN stands for synchronize or start) is a request that is sent to a server when establishing a network connection (e.g., when someone issues a telnet request). In a normal sequence, the server replies with a SYN ACK (an acknowledgment) and the client then sends an ACK in response to the SYN ACK. This orderly handshaking establishes a connection and is called the TCP three-way handshake.

The topics and cases examined have illustrated some of the legal and ethical issues associated with computer crimes particularly in hacking. The cases examined have shown that most hackers did not profit financially from their activities. The sole purpose of the attack fashioned by "Mafia boy" was to cause damage. Similarly, in the case of the Cyber-terrorists the only purpose is to cause damage. Although Kevin's hacking career resulted in minimal damage, as compared to the other cases, his motivations were to be challenged and to gain knowledge.

What does this have to do with computers? Originally, nothing. But there are standards for success as a hacker, just as grades form a standard for success as a tool. The true hacker can't just sit around all night; he must pursue some hobby with dedication and flair. It can be telephones, or railroads (model, real, or both), or science fiction fandom, or ham radio, or broadcast radio. It can be more than one of these. Or it can be computers. In 1986, the word "hacker" is generally used among MIT students to refer not to computer hackers but to building hackers, people who explore roofs and tunnels where they're not supposed to be.]

Why are the ACKs not returned? Generally, connection requests sent in SYN floods contain false source addresses. TCP SYN floods are sent with random source addresses. Therefore, when t

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Approximate Word count = 5937
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page double spaced)