The online world, much like the physical world, has its fair share of crime and these very often come in the form of cyberattacks. A cyberattack in a nutshell is a way by which people look to cause damage to a business, steal data and details or which set to to hack a system in order to gain access to the server. These attacks are highly damaging to businesses and private individuals and there are a number of ways in which they can happen. To find out more we caught up with cyber security expert Bharat Bhise HNA, who explained to us some of the most common forms of cyberattacks.
Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service
The cyberattack which you may have heard most about are those of DoS and DDoS, attacks which seek to overwhelm a system’s resources so that it can no longer respond to any requests. Strangely there is no real benefit to attackers when carrying out this attack and they are not able to use it to obtain or steal any information, nor to implement code which will gain access to a system. These attacks are used to show power, to take a system offline and to cause maximum chaos. The attacks are simple in their makeup, they simply use a multitude of systems to perform millions of requests in a short space of time, which end up crashing the system.
MitM Attack
The Man in the Middle Attack is one which strikes fear into the heart of many businesses and it can be used to steal large amounts of sensitive information. The way in which this works is that the hacker intercepts a login attempt by a user signing into the main server. The attacker gains control of the client, disconnects the connection from the server and then replaces the client’s IP address with their own, which gains them access to the server both now and going forward.
Phishing Attack
A phishing attack is something which you may very well be familiar with if you have received a suspicious email from a member of some African royal family promising you a large payment if you hand over your details. There are two main intentions of these attacks, the first being that it presents an opportunity to install malware on your computer and the second is that it can be used to obtain sensitive information such as bank details.
Password Attack
Password attacks are made easy by users who do not come up with a password that is complex or difficult. Hackers will either use a brute force attack on this which applies logic to the guessing of a password or a dictionary attack which is usually a collection of commonly used passwords, which are then attempted automatically.
All of these attacks can cause big problems for businesses and individual users, which is why it is so important that you are aware of them.
