Chapter 9: Identifying Threats, Attacks, and Vulnerabilities

As a security professional, you must be fully aware of the different types of attacks that your company could be subjected to. The different attacks range from different types of malware that employees may come across to social engineering, where the attacker will contact them directly and try to exploit their personal vulnerability. We will then look at the different types of threat actors and their characteristics. And finally, we will look at password exploitation and other advanced attacks.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Virus and Malware Attacks
• Social Engineering Attacks
• Threat Actors
• Advanced Attacks
• Security Concerns with Various Type of Vulnerabilities

Let's start by looking at virus and malware attacks.

Virus and Malware Attacks

In today's world, viruses and malware are everywhere. There are many different variants, and we will look at each of these in turn:

• Virus: A virus is a program that embeds itself in another program and can be executed in many different ways—for example, by clicking on a link on a web page, or by opening up an email attachment. Once it has been activated, it self-replicates, going from host to host.
• Polymorphic Virus: This virus mutates as it spreads so that it is difficult to detect. The hash value changes as it mutates and it may cause a program error if the file extension has changed, and the program is not on the computer.
• Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs): These are programs that are downloaded with other programs and they tend to use resources and slow your computer down. Installing Malwarebytes would alert you to them being installed.
• Fileless Virus: This virus runs in memory and is very hard to identify as it piggybacks...

Social Engineering Attacks

Social engineering attacks are based on the exploitation of someone's personality; they could be referred to as hacking the human. There are various types of social engineering attacks. Let's look at each of them in turn, starting with phishing/spear phishing:

• Phishing: Phishing attacks are indiscriminate email attacks requesting that the recipient completes an attached form (perhaps saying that there is a problem with their bank account). Such forms ask for personal details that could later be used for identity fraud. These emails often look as though they have come from a legitimate body, so users are fooled into carrying out the instructions they contain.
• Spear Phishing is a phishing attack that targets a specific group of people.
• Prepending: An attacker will add information to a subject line of an email to make it look as if has been scanned by the mail system before it arrives. This way, the users thinks that the email is safe...

Threat Actors

A threat actor is another name for a hacker or attacker who is likely to attack your company; they all have different attributes. They will investigate your company from the outside, looking for details on social media and search engines. Let's now look at threat actor types:

• Hackers: There are three different types of hackers, so let's now look at each of these in turn:

  a. Black Hat: The black hat hacker has no information because they are not authorized by the company.

  b. Gray Hat: The gray hat hacker is provided with limited information from the company as they may be participating in the bug bounty program. These may be semi-authorized. These may be known as ethical hackers.

  c. White Hat: The white hat hacker is an ethical hacker who is employed by the company to test applications for flaws and vulnerabilities before their release. They have all the information that they need, including the source code. These are authorized by the company as they are...

Advanced Attacks

In this section, we will be looking at advanced attacks, starting with types of password attacks.

Password Attacks

The two most common password attacks are dictionary attacks and brute-force attacks. Let's look at these in turn:

• Dictionary Attack: For a dictionary attack, we could start by using all of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and use them to try and crack passwords, but misspelled names or passwords with special characters such as $ or % can't be cracked, as they don't appear in the dictionary.

  Which of the following passwords would a dictionary attack crack?

  a. elasticity

  b. el@ST1city

  c. fred123

  d. blueberry

  It would crack elasticity and blueberry, but el@ST1city features numbers and characters not in a dictionary. Therefore, it will fail. It wouldn't crack fred123 either as it contains numbers.

  Example: An IT administrator was searching a security log and found the following entries. This is a dictionary attack...

Review Questions

Now it's time to check your knowledge. Answer the questions, and then check your answers, which can be found in the Solutions section at the end of the book:

1. If you install a freeware program that analyzes your computer and then finds 40,000 exploits and asks you to purchase the full version, what type of attack is this?
2. Describe how a fileless virus operates.
3. How does an attacker carry out credential harvesting?
4. How is pretexting used in an attack?
5. How does an invoice scam work?
6. How does an attacker carry out password spraying?
7. How does an attacker use a malicious USB drive?
8. How does artificial intelligence tainting help attackers?
9. When you go to a restaurant, how can you protect yourself against card cloning?
10. What is an on-path attack?
11. Why is operational technology vulnerable to attack?
12. Give an example of crypto-malware.
13. What type of malware self-replicates and which virus self-propagates itself?
...