How backdoors work

Some backdoors can be legitimate and are put in place by authorized vendors, at the same time other backdoors are introduced inadvertently as a result of programming errors. Sometimes backdoors are used during the development process and forgotten to be removed by the same developers.

Backdoors frequently are put also inside a malware that can act as a backdoor itself, or the backdoor can cause the platform to download other malware modules.

Even who should keep us safe such as encryption algorithms and networking protocols can also contain malware and backdoors. An example has happened in 2016 when researchers described how the prime numbers that are used in encryption algorithms could be designed in such a way that could activate an adversary to factor the primes and then break the encryption.

Detection and Prevention

Nowadays is easy to detect malware and particularly the backdoor cause the detection methods are influenced by the machine’s operating system.
Sometimes, the antimalware may be capable of detecting backdoor software but often the security professionals may need to use particular tools to detect and fix the backdoors. For avoiding a backdoor attack there are different strategies:
In the first case, the organization needs to adhere to security outclass practices, like avoiding untrusted programs and ensuring that all the network is protected by a nice firewall. The employment of a firewall can be so useful to detect attacks such as backdoors so that they limit the traffic that can circulate across open ports but it is important also to monitor network traffic for signature the presence of many types of malware including backdoors.
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Famous BackDoor attack

FireEye backdoor

Another famous backdoor attack was developed by the young hacker Jonathan James, At only 15 years old boy in 1999 succeeded intrude into United States of Department computers and NASA.
With this attack, Jonathan spied on the private conversations and inside top-secret documents that also contained important passwords of military devices. He succeeded in installing a backdoor on the servers and partly taking possession of limited NASA program code.

NASA and the US State Department

Another noteworthy hacker assault was the one engineered by Jonathan James, a 15 years old boy in 1999, who managed to sneak into NASA and US State Department computers. Specifically, this young man spied on thousands of e-mails and confidential documents that also contained passwords of military devices, installing on the servers a backdoor (a series of commands to access software) and partially taking possession of a NASA program code.