Five Most Dangerous Types of Network Attackers and Attacks

The five most dangerous types of network attackers and the types of attacks each will most likely use are:

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• Cybercriminals- Most likely to steal money using credit card theft, identity theft or even ransomware to hold computer data hostage for money.
• Insiders- Looking to steal or damage system for revenge depending upon the insiders motives.
• Business competitors- Most likely to break into a system to steal secretes or to perform DDoS attacks to shut the competition down.
• Cyber Terrorists or Cyber warfare- Cyber terrorists will look to cripple infrastructure or military computer systems, the same goes for cyber warfare.
• Hacktivists or Hobby Hackers- Hacktivists will be looking to perform break-ins to political targets to leverage their findings for their political agenda. Easy targets are always preferred such as when politicians use their private email server. While hobby hackers are all but gone, there are people just looking to break in for the thrill or to gain respect in the community. Today it is mostly just script-kiddies messing with their classmates.
  Cybercriminals are everywhere, I mean there is not a day that goes by where we do not receive at least 3 spoofed phone calls and receive 500 phishing emails. Most of these calls and emails are Cybercriminals looking to steal money in one way or another. The calls and emails start as social engineering attacks where they ether steal from you directly (if you are foolish enough), or they trick you into downloading malware or opening a website with malware embedded in its scripts. Sometimes these cyber criminals are able to obtain enough personal information about someone to actually steal their identity. While being tricked into giving away money or having your credit card number stolen is annoying, having ones identity stolen can have severe impacts on someone’s live. Cyber criminals are a real threat and cost many of people around the world a lot of money and headache (Bidgoli, 2010).
  Insiders can be anyone from employees, ex-employees or even third party vendors with access to your facility. Many people do not realize that it does not have to be a vendor who connects to your company system to do damage. Anyone with building access can potential do damage, it can be as easy as leaving a disk in the break-room that says something like “Employee pay rates”, but is loaded with malware, it will likely find its way to the computer system. In any case insiders are trusted and as such are dangerous. If the insider is a scorn ex-employee then they may be looking to erase data or cause system malfunctions, however they may just want to steal. If the insider is a current employee they also may want to steal. Third party vendors can also have similar access and similar motives as employees or ex-employees.
  Cyberterrorists or weapons of cyberwar can do real world damage just like the Stuxnet worm where the US and Israel used a cyber weapon to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges. Cyberterrorists are the biggest threat to the world in my opinion. Much of the infrastructure in first world countries have grown so dependent on technology that a cyberterrorist could actually do more damage with a malware than with a bomb. Power, gas, traffic, security and many other things are controlled by electrical devices, some time to the internet and other not. Whether or not these infrastructure devices are connected to the internet is irrelevant if they are controlled by computers they will always be vulnerable to attack. Any attack that takes down power to a large number of people will cause more death and chaos then a bomb going off in a populated place (Forstchen, 2009).
  Hacktivists are dangerous in their own way, in a society that is so divided by political opinion, classified or private information that can tip the scales to the their side it can be damaging to our society. Sometimes private conversations between friends taken out of context can be very damaging to someone’s public persona. Hacktivists will usually be an advanced persistent threat to their opposition.
  Now for each of these above threats there are precautions that can be taken to mitigate the risks associated with them such as:
• Credit Card theft- Use a chipped card instead of a magnetic strip, change your card often and check your statement irregularly for suspicious activity. Also never use your card at outdoor ATMs or at the very least check to see if the scanner has a false front.
• Identity theft- Protect your social security number as well as your personal data, do not keep this information online if possible and if you must them make sure to encrypt it.
• Social engineering- Training and vigilance is the only way to your company safe from such attacks.
• Malware- Training helps with malware but a good Antivirus software that is constantly updated is key trying to keep a system as safe as possible.
• Break-ins- The best way to prevent break-ins is a combination of intrusion detection, intrusion prevention, the use of Honey Pots and trained employees and enough of them to review security logs (Bidgoli, 2010). Also we need to have modern firewalls and last but not least employees must be diligent in keeping software up to date with patches. Basically Hackers will run a vulnerability scan on the intended target then check the CVE/CVSS for known vulnerabilities to the software running on the target system then use any vulnerability they can to break in. Once the hacker gains access they will up their privileges and give themselves full access by setting up a back door. Once they are in they can do anything including installing spyware or other malicious software of their choosing.
• DDoS- first thing you should monitor for sudden spikes in traffic, identifying an attack early (like with most things in life), will give you a better fighting chance. Another way to help is to over-provision your bandwidth, have something like 500 times what you need to run your site. Next rate limit your router to prevent your Web server from being overwhelmed, add filters to tell your router to drop packets from obvious sources of attack, timeout half-open connections more aggressively and drop spoofed or malformed packages. lastly you can set lower SYN, ICMP, and UDP flood drop thresholds
  Once a company has done all that they can to become a hard target they will likely experience less attack attempts because like most criminals, hackers choose easy targets.
  Works Cited
  Bidgoli, H. (2010). Mis -Student Edition (11) . Boston: Cengage Learning.
  Forstchen, W. R. (2009). 1 Second After. Forge Books.

By: Frank Aiello 1/31/2019