Types of Attacks Flash Cards
Define Social Engineering
A general term for attackers trying to trick people into revealing sensitive information or performing certain actions, such as downloading and executing files that appear to be benign but are actually malicious. -nist.gov
Define Phishing
Tricking individuals into disclosing sensitive personal information to gain access to sensitive data (such as bank account numbers) by claiming to be a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication (e.g., internet web sites). -nist.gov
Define Spear Phishing
A colloquial term that can be used to describe any highly targeted phishing attack. -nist.gov
Define Whaling
A specific kind of phishing that targets high-ranking members of organizations. -nist.gov
Define Vishing
An electronic fraud tactic in which individuals are tricked into revealing critical, financial, or personal information to unauthorized entities (-techtarget.com) conducted by voice email, VoIP (Voice over IP), or landline or Cellular telephone. (can be called voice or VoIP Phishing)
Define Tailgating
Tailgating, sometimes referred to as piggybacking, is a physical security breach in which an unauthorized person follows an authorized individual to enter a secured premise. Tailgating provides a simple social engineering-based way around many security mechanisms one would think of as secure. -techtarget.com
Define Impersonation
Practice of pretending to be another person to obtain information, access to a person, company, or computer system. -social-engineer.org
Define Dumpster Diving
The act of going through trash to find sensitive information that may help the attacker carry out their attack.
As the name suggests information is often gained by entering or otherwise gaining access to trash in a dumpster or other type of trash receptacle.
Define Shoulder Surfing
In this attack the attacker attempts to see the user screen by looking over the user's shoulder.
This can occur close or even across the room.
The attacker is attempting to discover sensitive information, including usernames and passwords
Define Hoax
A hoax is a fake warning or story – sometimes preposterous
Define Watering Hole Attack
A security exploit where the attacker infects websites that are frequently visited by members of the group being attacked, with a goal of infecting a computer used by one of the targeted group when they visit the infected website. -nist.gov
Define Principles (reasons for effectiveness)
Define Authority
Person(s) or established bodies with rights and responsibilities to exert control in an administrative sphere. -nist.gov
Define Intimidation
Intentional behavior that "would cause a person of ordinary sensibilities" to fear injury or harm. -Wikipedia
Define Consensus
The attempt to persuade the victim by using internet articles or other sources to prove the act they are attempting is legitimate.
Define Scarcity
The possibility that something of value may not be available in the future.
Define Familiarity
When an attacker takes the time to become your friend in hopes of tricking you into giving them useful information or access.
Define Trust
When an attacker is able to get a firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength from an unsuspecting victim.
Define Urgency
When an attacker urges the victim to act quickly.
Define Application/Service Attacks
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Define DoS
The prevention of authorized access to resources or the delaying of time-critical operations. (Time-critical may be milliseconds or it may be hours, depending upon the service provided). -nist.gov
Define DDoS
A denial of service technique that uses numerous hosts to perform the attack. -nist.gov
Define Man-in-the-Middle
A form of active wiretapping attack in which the attacker intercepts and selectively modifies communicated data to masquerade as one or more of the entities involved in a communication association. -nist.gov
Define Buffer Overflow
A method of overloading a predefined amount of memory storage in a buffer, which can potentially overwrite and corrupt memory beyond the buffer’s boundaries. -nist.gov
Define Injection
An injection attack, an attacker supplies untrusted input to a program. This input gets processed by an interpreter as part of a command or query. In turn, this alters the execution of that program. -acunetix.com
Define Cross-Site Scripting
A vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious code into an otherwise benign website. These scripts acquire the permissions of scripts generated by the target website and can therefore compromise the confidentiality and integrity of data transfers between the website and client. Websites are vulnerable if they display user supplied data from requests or forms without sanitizing the data so that it is not executable. -nist.gov
Define Cross-Site Request Forgery
An attack in which a Subscriber who is currently authenticated to an RP and connected through a secure session, browses to an Attacker’s website which causes the Subscriber to unknowingly invoke unwanted actions at the RP. For example, if a bank website is vulnerable to a CSRF attack, it may be possible for a Subscriber to unintentionally authorize a large money transfer, merely by viewing a malicious link in a webmail message while a connection to the bank is open in another browser window. -nist.gov
Define Privilege Escalation
The exploitation of a bug or flaw that allows for a higher privilege level than what would normally be permitted. -nist.gov
Define ARP Poisoning
ARP Poisoning (also known as ARP Spoofing) is a type of cyber attack carried out over a Local Area Network (LAN) that involves sending malicious ARP packets to a default gateway on a LAN in order to change the pairings in its IP to MAC address table. -radware.com
Define Amplification
An Amplification Attack is any attack where an attacker is able to use an amplification factor to multiply its power. -radware.com
Define DNS Poisoning
Domain Name Server (DNS) poisoning or spoofing is a type of cyber-attack that exploits system vulnerabilities in the domain name server to divert traffic away from legitimate servers and directs it towards fake ones. -kaspersky.com
Define Domain Hijacking
Domain hijacking is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of the original owner, or by abuse of privileges on domain hosting and domain registrar systems. -upguard.com
Define Man-in-the-Browser
A security attack where the perpetrator installs a Trojan horse on a victim's computer that's capable of modifying that user's Web transactions as they occur in real time. -techtarget.com
Define Zero Day
An attack that exploits a previously unknown hardware, firmware, or software vulnerability. -nist.gov
Define Replay (Application/Service Attacks)
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Define Pass the Hash
A hacking technique that allows an attacker to authenticate to a remote server or service by using the underlying NTLM or LanMan hash of a user's password, instead of requiring the associated plaintext password as is normally the case. It replaces the need for stealing the plaintext password with merely stealing the hash and using that to authenticate with. -wikipedia.org
Define Hijacking
A type of network security attack in which the attacker takes control of a communication - just as an airplane hijacker takes control of a flight - between two entities and masquerades as one of them. -techtarget.com
Define Clickjacking
An attack that tricks a user into clicking a webpage element which is invisible or disguised as another element. This can cause users to unwittingly download malware, visit malicious web pages, provide credentials or sensitive information, transfer money, or purchase products online. -imperva.com
Define Session Hijacking
An attack in which the Attacker is able to insert himself or herself between a Claimant and a Verifier subsequent to a successful authentication exchange between the latter two parties. The Attacker is able to pose as a Subscriber to the Verifier or vice versa to control session data exchange. Sessions between the Claimant and the Relying Party can also be similarly compromised. -nist.gov
Define URL Hijacking
The process by which a URL is wrongly removed from the search engine index and replaced by another URL. The new, false URL still links to the actual target page, not directly, but via a redirect. -ionos.com
Define Typo Squatting
A form of cybersquatting (sitting on sites under someone else's brand or copyright) that targets Internet users who incorrectly type a website address into their web browser (e.g., “Gooogle.com” instead of “Google.com”). -mcafee.com
Define Driver Manipulation
Device drivers allow an operating system such as Windows to talk to hardware devices such as printers. Sophisticated attackers may dive deep into the device drivers and manipulate them so that they undermine security on your computer. -oreilly.com
Define Shimming
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Define Refactoring
The process of altering an application's source code without changing its external behavior. The purpose of code refactoring is to improve some of the nonfunctional properties of the code, such as readability, complexity, maintainability and extensibility. -techopedia.com
Define MAC Spoofing
A technique for changing a factory-assigned Media Access Control (MAC) address of a network interface on a networked device. -wikipedia.com
Define IP Spoofing
A hacker uses tools to modify the source address in the packet header to make the receiving computer system think the packet is from a trusted source, such as another computer on a legitimate network, and accept it. -kaspersky.com
Define Wireless Attacks
A wireless attack is a malicious action against wireless system information or wireless networks; examples can be denial of service attacks, penetration, and sabotage. -igi-global.com
Define Replay (wireless attacks)
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Define IV
A binary vector used as the input to initialize the algorithm for the encryption of a plaintext block sequence to increase security by introducing additional cryptographic variance and to synchronize cryptographic equipment. The initialization vector need not be secret. Some of the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm Modes of Operation require 3 initialization vectors (IV) -nist.gov
Define Evil Twin
A fraudulent Wi-Fi access point that appears to be legitimate but is set up to eavesdrop on wireless communications. The evil twin is the wireless LAN equivalent of the phishing scam. -wikipedia.org
Define Rogue AP
A Rogue AP is an access point that has been installed on a secure network without explicit authorization from a system administrator. -cisco.com
Define Jamming
An attack that attempts to interfere with the reception of broadcast communications. -nist.gov
Define WPS
A communications protocol designed to help facilitate the setup of wireless networks in homes and small offices. -techopedia.com
Define Bluejacking
A hacking method that allows an individual to send anonymous messages to Bluetooth-enabled devices within a certain radius. -techopedia.com
Define Bluesnarfing
The unauthorized access of information from a wireless device through a Bluetooth connection, often between phones, desktops, laptops, and PDAs (personal digital assistant). -wikipedia.org
Define RFID
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) uses electromagnetic fields to automatically identify and track tags attached to objects. -wikipedia.org
Define NFC
Stands for "Near Field Communication." NFC is a short-range wireless technology that enables simple and secure communication between electronic devices. -techterms.org
Define Disassociation
A type of denial-of-service attack that targets communication between a user and a Wi-Fi wireless access point. -wikipedia.org
Define Cryptographic Attacks
A method for circumventing the security of a cryptographic system by finding a weakness in a code, cipher, cryptographic protocol or key management scheme. -Wikipedia.org
Define Birthday
A type of cryptographic attack that exploits the mathematics behind the birthday problem in probability theory. This attack can be used to abuse communication between two or more parties. -wikipedia.org
Define Plain Text and Cipher Text
Plain text: Unencrypted information that may be input to an encryption operation. -nist.gov
Cipher text: The result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. -Wikipedia
Define Rainbow Tables
A listing of all possible plaintext permutations of encrypted passwords specific to a given hash algorithm. Rainbow tables are often used by password cracking software for network security attacks. -techtarget.com
Define Dictionary
A dynamic-length data structure that stores a collection of elements or values, where a unique label identifies each element. The label can be any data type. -nist.gov
Define Brute Force
An attack that involves trying all possible combinations to find a match. -nist.gov
Define Brute Force (Online and Offline)
An attempt to crack a password or username or find a hidden web page, or find the key used to encrypt a message, using a trial and error approach and hoping, eventually, to guess correctly. -kaspersky.com
Define Collision Attack
A cryptographic hash tries to find two inputs producing the same hash value, i.e. a hash collision. This is in contrast to a preimage attack where a specific target hash value is specified. -wikipedia.org
Define Downgrade
An authorized reduction in the level of protection to be provided to specified information, e.g., from a Moderate impact-level down to a Low impact-level. -nist.gov
Define Replay (Cryptographic Attacks)
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Define Weak Implementations
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