When a criminal is hacking an organization, they will use their own strategies without changing much, unless they have to. They will use the same attacking methodologies that have been effective like phishing, malware, and cross-site scripting.
If you are trying to understand the breach in your organization or the one that is on the news headline, it is vital to understand the different types of attacks that can cause harm, although you can use web application vulnerability scanner to identify weak points in your system. We are going to look at some of the most common attacks that are used today.
Phishing
In a normal case, chances are that you will not open or click on a random attachment that is in an email that you find in your inbox. Attackers are also aware of this behavior. When an attacker wants to install malware to access some sensitive information, they will use phishing or pretend to an entity familiar to you in a way you wouldn’t know. Since they know humans are curious and impulsive; it is hard to stop phishing attacks.
You might receive emails that seem to originate from someone you trust, like your colleague at work or a company you have worked with before. The email will look legitimate, and it will require urgency in acting on it. In the email, an attachment or a link will be present. When you open the attachment, you will install the malware in your system. To fight phishing attacks, always verify the email sender and the links.
Malware
If you have clicked an attachment that is malicious, or an antivirus alert pops up on your monitor/screen, then you have encountered a malware. Gaining access to a user’s computer is easy using malware since it is effective.
Malware can be ransomware or a virus. Once it is in your computer, it can take control your machine, cause havoc to your system, or monitor your actions so that it can send all kinds of information to the home base of the attacker.
SQL Injection Attack
SQL is a language used by systems to communicate with databases. Most of the servers where data from sites are stored use SQL to manage the data. An SQL Injection attack targets these types of servers using code to extract information from the site. Some of the sensitive information that is sourced can include usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other information.
If there is a SQL vulnerability in your server, chances of an SQL injection attack are high. For instance, if the SQL server is vulnerable, an attacker can type a code in the search box of the website and for the server to extract the access details from the site.
Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
If your website is flooded with a lot of traffic that it was meant to handle, the website’s server will not be able to serve its visitors. This can happen due to malicious attacks which overwhelm the site and shut it down for its users.
When the DoS attack is made by many computers simultaneously, it is called Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). This attack can be hard to overcome because the attack is using different IP addresses spread all over the world.
