The GoCertify Team Wishes You a Happy Halloween

Boo! Something wicked this way comes, kiddies. Here in the United States, where GoCertify has its global headquarters, we're celebrating Halloween this week. That is some people's absolute favorite holiday on the calendar, and makes other people want to punch the whole world in the face.

Whichever camp you fall into, we have a fun holiday treat from our friends at Certification Magazine. In honor of the final day of October — coming up at the end of the week — and all of the trick-or-treaty goodness that comes with it, the CertMag team has created a topical quiz and graciously allowed us to repost it here.

(Topical, of course, because October, in addition to containing everyone's favorite jack-o-lantern-themed autumnal celebration, is also Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Do your part. #BeCyberSmart.)

See how you do! And don't forget to click to Page 2 of this article to see the answers.

1) What is the name of the worm, first detected on Jan. 26, 2004, that attacked Microsoft Windows and became the fastest-spreading worm to date?

2) Which real-life hacker stole and sold military technology from the French conglomerate Dassault Group, ultimately causing an estimated $360 million in damages prior to his arrest in 2008?

3) Which tenderhearted and fast-propagating worm, discovered May 4, 2000, inspired a song titled "E-mail" by British synth-pop duet Pet Shop Boys?

4) What hacker gained notoriety by cracking the U.S. Department of Defense computer network in 1999 at age 15?

5) The Slammer worm (also called SQL Slammer) slowed the internet to a crawl and caused a general panic on Jan. 25, 2003, by infecting approximately how many servers?

6) Who is the real-life hacker who provided the inspiration for the character played by Matthew Broderick in the 1983 movie WarGames?

7) What Trojan horse galloped across the globe in January 2007 using e-mails with provocative subject lines like "Saddam Hussein safe and sound!" and "Naked teens attack home director"?

8) Which worm, first detected in 2003, operated in part by removing a similar worm whenever it infected a new system?

9) Which cybersecurity luminary in 2015 briefly announced himself as the 2016 U.S. presidential candidate of the newly formed Cyber Party, before shifting a few months later to seek the nomination of the Libertarian Party?

10) What is the true identity of the hacker Acid Burn, who helped subvert the salami-slice hack of Ellingson Mineral Company in 1995?

ANSWERS

1) Mydoom. The nickname was assigned by security researcher Craig Schmugar, who noticed the text snippet "mydom" in the worm's code.

2) ASTRA. Though news organizations, at the time of his arrest, identified the hacker ASTRA as a 58-year-old Greek mathematician, his full identity was never disclosed. In Hindu mythology, the word "astra" refers to a supernatural weapon.

3) ILOVEYOU. The worm was created by then-24-year-old Filipino college student Onel de Guzman.

4) Jonathan James. James, the first juvenile to be incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States, committed suicide at age 24 shortly after being investigated in connection with a large-scale hack of department store chain TJX.

5) 75,000. It is estimated that SQL Slammer did most of its damage in the first fifteen minutes after it appeared.

6) David Scott Lewis. Though Kevin Mitnick is sometimes said to have inspired the movie by hacking NORAD computers in real life (something Mitnick says he never actually did), screenwriters Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes met and interviewed Lewis while developing the script for the movie.

7) Storm Worm. The name comes from one of the click-baiting e-mail subject lines: "230 dead as storm batters Europe." Just three days after its initial appearance (on Jan. 19, 2007), the Storm Worm accounted for 8 percent of all malware infections worldwide.

8) Welchia. This "helpful" worm, sometimes also called the "Nachi worm," first appeared in the aftermath of  a wave of destruction wreaked by the Blaster worm. If Welchia detects Blaster on a system it has infected, it deletes Blaster and then attempts to download and install Microsoft security patches. Welchia was even designed to include a self-removal mechanism.

9) John McAfee. Pioneering cybersecurity researcher McAfee, who launched McAfee Associates in 1987, did not win the Libertarian nomination in 2016. In 2018, he announced his bid to become the 2020 presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, but was unsuccessful a second time.

10) Acid Burn, also known as Kate Libby, is a character in the 1995 film Hackers, played by Angelina Jolie.