The case study consists of a series of exercises in which you will respond to scenarios that occur within a fictitious company, The A-Team.
The A-Team is an international training and consulting company. You will take on the role of an enterprise administrator and solve a series of problems involving VOIP, software testing, SOA, wimax, GIS/Engineering, storage, RFID, and Research and Development.
- Install Windows 2000
- Configure Windows 2000
- Connect Windows 2000 to a Microsoft and Novell NetWare network
Along the way you will have access to important resources that will help you complete each task.
You will submit your case study exercise solutions to a mentor, and receive feedback about the various problems you solve for the A-Team.
In 2002 and 2003, as Microsoft tackled the security problem by releasing a more secure version of its server OS (Windows Server 2003) and started working on a more secure version of their consumer OS (Windows XP SP2) and moving to a monthly patch cycle, the attackers started moving up the stack, looking for other ways to get their malware and rootkits on to the system.
With many users installing Windows XP SP2 and having personal firewalls built-in to their home routers, social engineering as a means to
get malware installed, along with browser-based drive-by exploits, became more common.
Possibly as a result of firewalls and automatic updates, and the general drying up of remote anonymous vulnerabilities targeting system services in Windows,
in 2004 Internet Explorer exploits became increasingly popular as a method for getting malware (and sometimes rootkits) installed onto machines of victims.
By some estimates, IE users account for 80 to 85 percent of all Internet browsing traffic, so an exploit that can install malware via IE (with most users browsing the Web being logged in as administrators) is for all practical purposes as good as or better than the exploits that used to target system services in the Windows 2000 days.