| Daemon | A background process (pronounced “demon”) that carries out tasks on behalf of every user. Daemons spend most of their time sleeping until something comes along which requires their help. Unix systems have many daemons. The term probably originated in its mythological counterpart and was later rationalized into Disk And Execution MONitor. |
| Damaged.Family.Variant | Damaged virus (deteriorated or non-usable virus) |
| Decryption | The process of unscrambling ciphertext and returning it to plaintext (also known as decipherment). It is the reverse process of encryption (or encipherment).
Encryption and decryption both involve the use of a mathematical algorithm for transforming the data. In addition to the data to be transformed, the algorithm has one or more inputs that are control parameters:
* a key value that varies the transformation and, in some cases,
* an initialization value that establishes the starting state of the algorithm. |
| Denial of Service (DoS) | An attack that is specifically designed to prevent the normal functioning of a system, and thereby to prevent lawful access to that system and its data by its authorized users. DoS can be caused by the destruction or modification of data, by bringing down the system, or by overloading the system's servers (flooding) to the extent that service to authorized users is delayed or prevented.
Denial of Service attacks normally stem from external sources using telecommunications (such as via the Internet); or from disaffected or disgruntled employees who bear a grudge towards the company. |
| DenialOfService.Family.Variant | Denial of Service Tools, simple or distributed (remote attack programs) |
| DMZ (or Perimeter Network) | Sometimes called a DMZ (de-militarized zone), a perimeter network is an additional network between the protected network and the unprotected network, providing an additional layer of security.Servers that are necessarily exposed to the Internet (such as web servers, mail servers) are best placed in the DMZ and protected by a firewall or firewalls. Further firewalls separate the DMZ from the trusted network, or corporate LAN.
The term 'DMZ' comes from the zone separating North and South Korea. |
| DNS Poisoning | A way of forcing users to a malicious site by injecting bad data into a domain name server's cache in order to change (for users of that server) the destination a domain resolves to. The effect of DNS poisoning is that the conversion from a URL to an IP address fails. For example, instead of translating the address www.americanexpress.com to the IP address corresponding to the actual site of American Express, a server that has been a victim of DNS poisoning will supply the incorrect IP address. The URL that the user types will still be printed in the address bar, and if the content of the fraudulent website to which the translation is done looks the same as that of the legitimate site, then the user will not notice that the attack took place. Moreover, the fraudulent website will be able to harvest all the cookies intended for the legitimate website, which will allow it to impersonate the user's machine to the real site as well. Also see man-in-the-midddle attacks. DNS poisoning is sometimes referred to as pharming, and can be performed in a large number of ways. One of the recently discovered ways in which an attacker can mount an attack of this sort is by uploading malware to a person's router (or access point). These are devices that have no inherent protection against malware, but which are very powerful in that all the user's Internet traffic passes through these machines. Therefore, an infected router can easily cause incorrect IP address information to be returned to an unsuspecting user. |
| DNS server | A server that translates DNS names (such as malwarecity.com) into an IP address that is actually used for communication on the Internet. |
| Dropper.Family.Variant | Dropper.Family.Variant Virus dropper (a program that launches/drops a virus). |
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