Lab 6: Distribution & Infrastructure
Design and analyse a simulated distribution infrastructure for a fictional malware campaign.
The brief
Design a distribution infrastructure for a fictional malware campaign, and analyse its delivery mechanisms, scaling and failure points.
Falling in the mid-semester week, this lab steps back from a single target to a whole campaign: how malware travels from its creator to many targets, the infrastructure that delivery depends on, and what happens once that operation is required to scale.
Students design a distribution infrastructure for a fictional campaign, covering delivery mechanisms, supporting infrastructure and the costs of running it, and analyse where that infrastructure would be expected to fail. The exercise sits alongside this week’s own mid-semester retrospective, matching the lecture’s pause to take stock of the semester’s assessment work so far.
What you submit
- A diagram of the campaign's distribution infrastructure
- An analysis of its delivery mechanisms, costs and failure points
Due: 21 September 2027 ·Weight: 2% of the course grade
How it is marked
Assessed on whether the design and analysis show a working grasp of delivery, scaling, infrastructure dependencies and failure points.
Key dates
- Submission due: 21 September 2027
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- submitted by the deadline, in the format named below
- names the campaign's delivery mechanisms, scaling approach and at least one realistic failure point
- includes a diagram of the campaign's distribution infrastructure, not only a written description of it
- the analysis weighs the costs of running that infrastructure, not only its delivery mechanisms and failure points
- shows what would be expected to happen to the infrastructure and delivery as the campaign scales up