1.0 - Threats, Attacks, and Vulnerabilities

Question 1

Phishing

Answer 1

• Mixture of social engineering and spoofing, often delivered by SPAM, IM, etc.
• try to convince you to provide personal information, SSN, Credit Card, Bank info, etc.

Question 2

Spear Phishing

Answer 2

• Direct their efforts toward a specific, narrow group of people

Question 3

Whaling

Answer 3

• Phishing that target high level individuals such as CEO’s, CIOs, VPs, etc.

Question 4

Vishing

Answer 4

• “Voice-Phishing”
• Phishing conducted over the phone
• Fake security checks or banks updates

Question 5

Replay Attack

Answer 5

• an attacker captures data sent between two entities, modifies it, and then attempts to impersonate one of the parties by replaying the data
• WPA using TKIP is vulnerable to replay attacks

Question 6

Downgrade Attack

Answer 6

• forces a system to downgrade its security

- attackers bypass a stronger security suite and exploit the weaker suite

Question 7

DoS

Answer 7

• an attack from a single source that attempts to disrupt the services provided by another system

Question 8

DDoS

Answer 8

• an attack from multiple sources that attempts to disrupt the services provided by another system
• typically include sustained, abnormally high network traffic

Question 9

Man-in-the-Middle

Answer 9

• an attackers accepts traffic from each party in a conversation and forwards the traffic between the two
• the two parties are unaware of the MITM and it can interrupt the traffic at will or insert malicious code

Question 10

ARP Poisoning

Answer 10

• attack that misleads computers or switches about the actual MAC address of a system
• ARP poisoning is sometimes used in MITM attacks

Question 11

Amplification

Answer 11

• attack that significantly increases the amount of traffic sent to, or request from, a victim
• can be used against a wide variety of systems, including individual hosts, DNS servers, and NTP servers

Question 12

Birthday Attack

Answer 12

• attacker is able to create a password that produces the same hash as the user’s actual password
• this is called a hash collision

Question 13

Replay Attack

Answer 13

• replay attacks capture data in a session with the intent to later impersonate one of the parties in the session
• an attacker captures data sent between two entities, modifies it, and then attempts to impersonate one of the parties by replaying the data
• WPA using TKIP is vulnerable to replay attacks

Question 14

Collision Attack

Answer 14

• collision attack occurs when the hashing algorithm creates the same hash from different passwords

Question 15

Dictionary Attack

Answer 15

• a dictionary attack uses a file of words and common passwords to guess a password

Question 16

Brute Force Attack

Answer 16

• a brute force attacks attempts to guess all possible character combinations
• can be done online or offline

Question 17

Rainbow Tables Attack

Answer 17

• type of attack that attempts to discover the password from the hash
• uses huge databases of passwords and their calculated hashes
• attacker compares the hash of the original password against hashes stored in the huge rainbow table

Question 18

XSS

Answer 18

• cross-site scripting allows attackers to embed malicious HTML or JavaScript code into a web site’s code
• allows attackers to capture user information such as cookies

Question 19

XSRF

Answer 19

• cross-site request forgery scripting causes users to perform actions on web sites such as making purchases, without their knowledge
• in some cases it allows attackers to steal cookies and harvest passwords

Question 20

Active Reconnaissance

Answer 20

• active reconnaissance methods use tools such as network scanners to gain information on the target

Question 21

Passive Reconnaissance

Answer 21

• passive reconnaissance methods use open-source intelligence methods, such as social media and an organizations website

Question 22

Penetration Testing

Answer 22

• penetration test is intrusive and can potentially compromise a system
• a penetration test is an active test that can assess deployed security controls and determine the impact of a threat
• it starts with a vulnerability scan and then tries to exploit vulnerabilities by actually attacking or simulating an attack

Question 23

Vulnerability Scanning

Answer 23

• vulnerability scans are passive and have little impact on a system during a test