To make matters worse, the nature of vandals makes them ideal tools for people trying to target a particular user. Someone can send the vandal as an email attachment or place it on a web site visited by the user. Therefore, any protection against vandals needs to be proactive and needs to be able to cope with new, unknown vandals. The attacks can steal passwords, files, or other confidential data. Some examples of company information that could be exposed or include login names and passwords, secret project information, IPO plans, credit card numbers, confidential phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses, and more.
Vandals can also delete, encrypt, or modify files on disk.
Real-life examples of these attacks are described later in this paper. Access violation attacks require behavior monitoring and can't be effectively blocked by 'code scanning' methods. Denial of Service Attacks Denial of Service attacks prevent the user from using the system, and may destroy files that are open at the time of the attack. They work by performing repetitive tasks like opening an infinite number of windows until the system locks up. These types of attacks can be stopped through inspection of all incoming content.