Cyber Threats: Understanding the Various Forms of Cyber-Attacks

Running head: CYBER THREATS
CYBER THREATS
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CYBER THREATS
The rapid evolvement of the technology in the modern society allowing creativity in
almost every aspects of life including black market. As the applications of the technology is
spreading more than before and peoples are also depending on the technology for automate or
ease most of their crucial tasks. Nowadays, Internet contains many vital and crucial information
associated with the user data. Protecting user data is also an important aspect in the technologies
development. Security measures such as encryption, firewall and many more security measures
are implemented as the networks grew more complex and the number of devices associated with
the network become more mobile and more varied. This security measures are implemented for
protecting the vital information from the third parties. There are several cases where, third parties
were able to gain entrance to the plant’s network, stimulated in order to manipulate the
manufacturing network and then debilitated to the shut-down the valves of the plant’s blast
incinerators. In the dialect of the industry, this can be called as a “kinetic” or physical attack
against the hard resources present. Cyber-attacks has become one of the critical issue which is
hard to solve. In past years, several huge security breach shocked the world as millions user
account has been compromised with the vital information. However, third parties are not always
design any malicious software for data collection. For instance, Ransomware ware infected in a
computer to block entree to the system until a sum of money is paid as a ransom.

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Figure 1: Cyber threats impact on the world
Source: (Linkov et al., 2013)
The cyber-attacks were firstly focused on the individuals and around 2015 the attackers
were started focusing on the power industry. Several organization faced this type of threat.
Recently, Social media sites like yahoo and linked in faced cyber-attacks where lot of user
accounts has been compromised. Usually, third parties are driven by the money. Third parties
primarily targets large monoculture where lot of valuable information can be found. They target
those system which are connected with the business and stores a lot of valuable information

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(Zhang, 2013). In the last decades there are several cyber-attack which are responsible for
serious amount of damage.
Trojan (generally called as Trojan horse) is a malicious computer software which deceives
user of its true intent. The name Trojan came from the ancient language of Greece. The original
Trojan horse was used to sneak into the enemy territory with highly fortified gate (Loukas, Gan
& Vuong, 2016). The horse seems like a charm and the attackers take advantage of the horse to
breach the defenders wall. In similar fashion, the Trojan virus sneak past the computer security
such as firewall by tricking the user (Marinos, 2013). It looks like a normal software and
designed with different names. So users was not able to identify the risk and install it on their
computer. The designers of the program used it to achieve some goals as follows:
 It is designed to trick user or system into installing the program. Usually, it comes as an
extra piece of software with bundle. It uses users as an entrance vehicle to breach into the
system.
 It blends with existing installed program which runs on the same system. As the name
implies, it camouflages itself so user is totally unaware of its activity and continue their
activity.
Attackers used a myriad methods for blend the malicious program capabilities into the
normal software. These methods include employing simple but highly effective naming games
while utilizing the attacking software distributing sites, executable wrappers and manipulating
source code. It manipulates the windows to create an .EXE suffix where the text file must be end
with the .txt. The unknown .exe files cause trouble around the system (Heickero, 2013). The
malicious program camouflages itself like a text file when noticed in the file explorer. Most user