Other Types of Cyber Security Threats

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack?

Denial-of-service (DDoS) aims at shutting down a network or service, causing it to be inaccessible to its intended users. The attacks accomplish this mission by overwhelming the target with traffic or flooding it with information that triggers a crash. In both situations, the DoS onslaught denies legitimate users such as employees, account holders, and members of the resource or service they expected.

DDoS attacks are often targeted at web servers of high-profile organizations such as trade organizations and government, media companies, commerce, and banking. Although these attacks don’t result in the loss or theft of vital information or other assets, they can cost a victim lots of money and time to mitigate. DDoS is often used in combination to distract from other network attacks.

Password Attack

A password attack simply means an attempt to decrypt or obtain a user’s password with illegal intentions.

Crackers can use password sniffers, dictionary attacks, and cracking programs in password attacks. There are few defense mechanisms against password attacks, but usually, the remedy is inculcating a password policy that includes a minimum length, frequent changes, and unrecognizable words.

Password attacks are often carried out by recovering passwords stored or exported through a computer system. The password recovery is usually done by continuously guessing the password through a computer algorithm. The computer tries several combinations until it successfully discovers the password.

Eavesdropping Attack

Eavesdropping attacks start with the interception of network traffic.

An Eavesdropping breach, also known as snooping or sniffing, is a networksecurity attack where an individual tries to steal the information that smartphones, computers and other digital devices send or receive This hack capitalizes on unsecured network transmissions to access the data being transmitted. Eavesdropping is difficult to detect since it doesn’t cause abnormal data transmissions.

These attacks target weakened transmissions between the client and server that enables the attacker to receive network transmissions. An attacker can install network monitors such as sniffers on a server or computer to perform an eavesdropping attack and intercept data as it is being transmitted. Any device within the transmitting and receiving network is a vulnerability point, including the terminal and initial devices themselves. One way to protect against these attacks is knowing what devices are connected to a particular network and what software is run on these devices.

Birthday attack

The birthday attack is a statistical phenomenon that simplifies the brute-forcing of one-way hashes. It is based on the birthday paradox that states that for a 50 percent chance that someone shares your birthday in any room, you need 253 individuals in the room. However, for a chance higher than 50 percent, you only require 23 people. This probability works because these matches depend on pairs. If you choose yourself as one of the pairs, you only need 253 people to get the required number of 253 pairs. However, if you just need matches that don’t include you, you only need 23 people to create 253 pairs when cross-matching with each other. Thus, 253 is the number you need to acquire a 50 percent probability of a birthday match in a room.

Brute-Force and Dictionary Network Attacks

Dictionary and brute-force attacks are networking attacks whereby the attacker attempts to log into a user’s account by systematically checking and trying all possible passwords until finding the correct one.

The simplest method to attack is through the front door since you must have a way of logging in. If you have the required credentials, you can gain entry as a regular user without creating suspicious logs, needing an unpatched entry, or tripping IDS signatures. If you have a system’s credentials, your life is even simplified since attackers don’t have these luxuries.

The term brute-force means overpowering the system through repetition. When hacking passwords, brute force requires dictionary software that combines dictionary words with thousands of different variations. It is a slower and less glamorous process. These attacks start with simple letters such as “a” and then move to full words such as “snoop,” or “snoopy.”

Brute-force dictionary attacks can make 100 to 1000 attempts per minute. After several hours or days, brute-force attacks can eventually crack any password. Brute force attacks reiterate the importance of password best practices, especially on critical resources such as network switches,  routers and servers.

Insider Threats

Not every network attack is performed by someone outside an organization.

Inside attacks are malicious attacks performed on a computer system or network by an individual authorized to access the system. Insiders that carry out these attacks have the edge over external attackers since they have authorized system access. They may also understand the system policies and network architecture. Furthermore, there is less security against insider attacks since most organizations focus on defending against external attacks.

Insider threats can affect all elements of computer security and range from injecting Trojan viruses to stealing sensitive data from a network or system. The attackers may also affect the system availability by overloading the network or computer processing capacity or computer storage, resulting in system crashes.

Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks

Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks are a type of cybersecurity breach that allows an attacker to eavesdrop a communication between two entities. The attack occurs between two legitimate communicating parties, enabling the attacker to intercept communication they should otherwise not be able to access. Thus the name “man-in-the-middle.” The attacker “listens” to the conversation by intercepting the public key message transmission and retransmits the message while interchanging the requested key with his own.

The two parties seem to communicate as usual, without knowing the message sender is an unknown perpetrator trying to modify and access the message before it is transmitted to the receiver. Thus, the intruder controls the whole communication.