HackingTheUniverse

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APT or Advanced Persistent Threat describes cyber attacks mounted by organizational teams that have deep resources, advanced penetration skills, specific target profiles and are remarkably persisent in their efforts. They tend to use sophisticated custom malware that can circumvent most defenses, stealthy tactics and demonstrate good situational awareness by evaluating defenders responses and escalating their [...]

Physical attacks are attacks that involve penetrating the physical security protecting information systems. In a facility with low physical security or public access, it can be as simple as walking into a building and sitting down at a computer system. Here is a list of some of the types of physical attacks: Walk-in – where [...]

Application attacks focus on application software instead of the operating system, where most classical perimeter exploit vulnerabilities are found. A wide variety of application attacks are aimed at web servers and associated functions, but they can also use other applications and protocols. Here is a sample list of some application attack vectors: SQL injection – [...]

Client-side attacks take advantage of weaknesses found in client software usually running on users workstations. Most client-side attacks involve either a web link to a web page that can deliver malware to exploit the client vulnerability or an email with some form of embedded malware that can exploit the client. Another common variation is to [...]

Wireless attacks are constantly changing and so are the defensive techniques used against them. Here are some of the areas involved with different wireless attacks: Recon – most wireless attacks start out with some form of recon. It is usually possible to sniff the wireless packets WEP – this security protocol is no longer safe [...]

Perimeter attacks involve using exploit code to take advantage of weaknesses detected in perimeter devices to take control of them or leverage some level of access into greater access. The list of known security holes in windows based systems is quite large and constantly growing. This puts the defenders in a position of needed to [...]

It is also possible to disrupt an organizational by using cyber-warfare attacks in conjunction with conventional tactics like bribery, extortion and even torture. These classical criminal methods are perhaps most likely to be used to gain access to a system or data, but could also be applied to a variety of tactics designed to create [...]

A Denial Of Service (DOS) attack is an attack designed to prevent some information resource from being used. This can include jamming up network pipes with traffic that slows down access, attacks that can shut down a device (computer, router, gateway…), attacks that change configuration parameters and many more. While the ideas are unlimited, most [...]

An attacker might also decide to alter system and device configurations in order to disrupt an organization. This could achieve a variety of goals: Small and subtle alterations could cause malfunctions that create loss of usefullness and overload support groups with problems that don’t have obvious solutions. Larger and more obvious alterations that cause serious [...]

One way that an attacker might use to disrupt an organization could be to alter data. This could either be done overtly or covertly, depending on the purpose: Overt data alteration – this could be designed either to force a reaction by the defenders or to discredit either the data or the defender organization Covert [...]