Information Warfare: Fighting Back Through the Matrix

Databases are always the main target of attackers because they contain the critical data of organizations. Although prevention techniques are available, the history of system break-ins guarantees that there is no foolproof technique that totally eliminates security loopholes in a computer system. Hence, efficient damage assessment and recovery techniques are needed. Traditional methods require scanning the entire log from the point of attack to the end which is a slow procedure. In this paper, we present an efficient damage assessment and recovery algorithm to recover the database from malicious transactions. The algorithm is based on data dependency and uses a single matrix that will be later used during recovery.