6 Fundamentals Of Cyber Security

Insider attack Active attack Passive attack Social engineering

When a person is exploited into giving away critical information that gives access to the network or accounts

When someone in an organisation gives away access details or sensitive information

When someone uses malware or other technical methods to compromise a network’s security

When a hacker eavesdrops on a network by ‘sniffing’ the data packets

Hackers mainly crack passwords

Finding people’s passwords to overcome authentication is called cracking the password

A brute force attack tries to crack a password by trying every single combination of letters and numbers until the correct one is found. This can take a very long time, although special software is used to do this which makes it possible to make millions of attempts per second

A quicker form of the brute force attack is the dictionary attack. Rather than attempting every single combination, a dictionary attack tries words from a predetermined list: A common dictionary to use would be a list of common passwords

Writing a network policy which enforces strong passwords can protect against dictionary attacks. Using two-factor authentication can prevent the hacker from logging in, even if they have the password. Restricting the number of failed password attempts before an account is ‘locked’ for a fixed period of time can deter hackers

A denial of service (DoS) attack tries to bring down a server by flooding it with useless traffic The attack aims to overload the server. This stops the server responding to legitimate traffic

To protect against DoS attacks, a server’s firewall can blacklist (ban) any traffic from an IP address which is known to perform DoS attacks. Firewalls can also monitor traffic in real time. So if a new IP address starts to send too much traffic then traffic limits can be set.

Distributed DoS (DDos) attacks are commonly used to overcome the blacklisting of an IP address because of a high number of requests In a DDoS attack, the requests are sent from an army of compromised machines, known as a botnet Botnet machines are infected with malware which allows a hacker to send requests from their computer The botnet can launch a huge number of simultaneous requests. The owners of the devices in the botnet might not even realise they are taking part

Authentication is the name for any methods which allow users to prove that an account is theirs

Penetration testing identifies vulnerabilities in a network’s security by attempting a controlled attack on the network This usually involves carrying out multiple types of attack to see which is most successful Penetration testing is done by the organisation itself, or an external organisation or contractor they have hired

A good penetration test will check: Technical vulnerabilities Likelihood of social engineering A test of damage recovery

Organisations choose to perform penetration testing to try to find vulnerabilities before criminals do If an organisation can find and fix a bug before it is exploited, it can save time and money

Black-box penetration testing White-box penetration testing

A black box penetration test is done outside of an organisation A system administrator might pay an outside organisation to attempt to gain access to their systems in a controlled way This will allow the system administrators to experience a ‘practice’ attack which is very similar to a real attack

A white box penetration test is done inside an organisation In a white box penetration test, system administrators will test how vulnerable the system is against someone with knowledge of the system, and possibly a user account with low access rights This will help to prevent insider attacks

Social engineers often cold call victims and pretend to be from an organisation such as a bank The social engineer will then ask a victim to confirm their details, so that they can use these details to access their account later

Fear is often used to put people off-guard and make them more likely to comply Social engineers know that people will make irrational decisions when panicked A common attack would be to call someone pretending to be a bank, and ask why they have emptied out their account: This would panic the victim, who would then want to sign into their account straight away over the phone

People

Education and Training Public Awareness Campaigns Company Security Policies