1. Baseline comparison, wherein one or more file attributes will be captured or calculated and stored as a baseline that can be compared against at some future time. This can be as simple as the time and date of the file, however, since this data can be easily spoofed, a more trustworthy approach is typically used. This may include periodically assessing the cryptographic checksum for a monitored file, (e.g. using the MD5 or SHA-2 hashing algorithm) and then comparing the result to the previously calculated checksum.