Hacker attacks: basic types and reasons

16 June 2021 In the modern realities organizations’ informational assets, which are stored in different informational systems (accounting systems, bank clients, corporate portals, work computers, file servers, database servers, mail systems, tablets, smartphones, websites, data storage devices), are material values. Confidential information, constituting a trade secret, referring to accounting, reporting information and customer data show special significance. Open Technologies Cybersecurity center has prepared a series of articles about hacker attacks: their types, security rules and preventive methods.

Wrest control (rights promotion) of distant/local computing system, its destabilization, and denial of service – all these are called hacker attack. There are different reasons of such attacks: rivalry, fraud, extortion, discountenance, amusement, political views, terrorism threads etc. Hackers often preliminarily choose their aim, gather information about the installed defense systems, combine simultaneously several methods of the inbreak, adapt their instruments to the existing defense and are ready to wait for quite a long time. In fact, they elaborately approach to this process.

There is a wide range of hacker attacks. Open Technologies’ specialists highlight the following types:
-    Phishing
-    Social engineering
-    Targeted attack
-    Malicious software (virus, trojans, cryptographers, ransomwares, mail worms, network worms, ad worms, sniffers, spies, browser hijacker, rootkits etc)
-    Web-vulnerabilities
-    Denial of service (DDoS)
-    Password hack (vocabulary, brute force)
-    Vulnerabilities in installed software usage
-    Day 0 vulnerabilities usage
-    Intermediary attack
-    Inner attack (personnel, insiders etc)
-    Using mobile devices and IoT

Every type of hacker attack can bring a vital damage to the informational systems and organizations, therefore it is a cunning question to provide attack defense measures or stop it on its initial stage. Each company from every economy sector should defend from hackers. A man remains the most vulnerable part in the security chain. There is no technical measures, which can defend from the variety of social engineering methods. It is a general practice, that hackers get accesses from mail delivery or malwares.

Target attacks using special software, we suppose, are the most destructive and instantly growing type of them. DDoS doesn’t mean the direct acquisition of the confidential information, but sometimes it supports the other kinds of attacks by draining focus and defense measures on the active DDoS.

There is no fully automatical defense measures from hacker attacks today. The main cyber hackers’ aim is to hack informational systems and possess information. The main aim of cybersecurity is to prevent the hack of informational systems.
We will announce the cybersecurity rules in our next article.

Author: Ivankov Alexey, system architect, Cybersecurity center, Open Technologies.

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