2.5 Compare and contrast social engineering, threats, and vulnerabilities.

Question 1

• Social engineering

Answer 1

Social engineering refers to means of getting users to reveal this kind of confidential information or allowing some sort of access to the organization that should not have been authorized.

A social engineering attack uses deception and trickery to convince unsuspecting users to provide sensitive data or to violate security guidelines.

Social engineering is often a precursor to another type of attack. It is also important to note that gaining access to a network is often based on a series of small steps rather than a single large step. That is, knowing the email address of an employee allows an attacker to search for facts about that user online. This might help target the user with fake messages.

A message might be convincing enough to persuade the user to reveal some confidential information or install some malware.

Question 2

• Phishing

Answer 2

The practice of sending emails to A Bunch of users with the purpose of tricking them info revealing personal information, OR clicking on a link.

A Phishing attack often sends the user to a malicious website that appears as the legitimate site….

Ex. ebay, bank, “we noticed suspicious activity on your account, plese click to ;login and fix…“…..

Question 3

• Spear phishing

Answer 3

Spear phishing is the term used for targeted attacks, like when a bad guy goes after a specific celebrity.

The dangerous thing about spear phishing is that the bait can be carefully tailored using details from the target’s life.

Question 4

• Impersonation

Answer 4

Impersonation (pretending to be someone else) is one of the basic social engineering techniques.

EXAMPLE: classic impersonation attack is for an attacker to phone into a department, claim they have to adjust something on the user’s system remotely, and get the user to reveal their password….

• Intimidate their target by pretending to be someone senior in rank.
• Intimidate the target by using spurious technical arguments and jargon or alarm them with a hoax.
• Coax the target by engaging with them in and putting them at their ease.

Question 5

• Shoulder surfing

Answer 5

Refers to stealing a password or PIN, or other secure information, by watching the user type it. May be in person, video or drone surveillance.

Question 6

Tailgating

Answer 6

Or (piggybacking) is a means of entering a secure area without authorization by following close behind the person – who is allowed to open the door or checkpoint. They sneak in behind you…. OR “forgot my badge

Question 7

• Dumpster diving

Answer 7

A social engineering technique of discovering things about an organization (or person) based on what it throws away

Question 8

• DDoS

Answer 8

distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that use many machines simultaneously to assault a system.

Question 9

• DoS

Answer 9

A denial of service (DoS) attack uses various methods to overwhelm a system, such as a Web server, to make it essentially nonfunctional.

Question 10

• Zero-day

Answer 10

the Zero-day attack, which occurs an attack comes out or is exploited the SAME Day a bug or issue or vulnerability is announced to the public-

there is NO known patch or fix yet- and hackers take advantage of and attack… .

Question 11

• Man-in-the-middle

Answer 11

A man-in-the-middle attack (MITM attack) is a cyber attack where an attacker relays and possibly alters communication between two parties who believe they are communicating directly.

This allows the attacker to relay communication, listen in, and even modify what each party is saying.

Question 12

• Brute force

Answer 12

Where someone tries to guess the passphrase to the network.

Often using the default user accounts- like admin/guest/etc.

Question 13

• Dictionary

Answer 13

a Password attack that uses a file of words and character combinations. the attack tries every entry within the file while trying to guess a password.

Question 14

• Rainbow table

Answer 14

A file containing precomputed hashes for character combinations. rainbow tables or use to discover password.

This method can have that password cracked in less than three minutes. You’ve got a hash of the password, you’re not guessing the password.

Question 15

Spoofing

Answer 15

also referred to as masquerading, as is impersonation. And they can spoof just about anything these days, guys.

They’ll spoof MAC addresses, they’ll spoof IP addresses, they’ll spoof the ARP response.

They’ll spoof the Referrer - like google for example, and that’s spelled right for the attack.

Question 16

• Non-compliant systems

Answer 16

Non-compliant systems are Legacy/Non-compliant systems, ARE a HUGE security risk for a number of reasons, if you’ve got older legacy systems in your place.

May be a threat to your business’ future. Your competition is moving everything to a hyper-responsive cloud data center.

Question 17

• Zombie

Answer 17

computers that are compromised and are under a hacker’s control.

They’re commonly used maliciously for things like distributed denial-of-service attacks,

Question 18

WINDOWS Host File

Answer 18

is Malwarebytes’ generic detection name for undesirable changes made in the Windows hosts file on the affected system.

The Windows hosts file is the first step in the process to resolve DNS queries, so it can be used to hijack internet traffic to different IP addresses.