Cyber Security Attacks and Techniques - Threat Analysis and Trends

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of cyber security attacks and techniques, focusing on threat actors, current trends, and vulnerabilities. It begins by defining different threat actors, such as state-sponsored actors, organized cybercrime groups, and hacktivists, outlining their motivations and defense strategies. The report identifies and describes current trends in cyber attacks, including the impact of various cyber threat vectors like malware, phishing, and denial-of-service attacks. It differentiates between untargeted and targeted attacks, providing examples of vulnerabilities exploited in each category, with a focus on malware and its exploitation of unpatched systems. The report also describes techniques used by attackers to infiltrate systems and escalate privileges, including attacks against network perimeters and end-users, as well as vulnerabilities in wireless WPA2 networks. Furthermore, it addresses Internet of Things (IoT) security issues, defining IoT and providing examples of IoT devices and their associated security concerns. The report concludes with a list of references used in the analysis.

Cyber security attacks and
techniques

Threats
Describe and provide a minimum of three examples for each of the following:
Threat actors
A state sponsored actor is one of the threat actors whose target is any and every
computer which gets motivated from the cyber warfare for political and economic
agendas. Its best defense is the patch for vulnerability management. Organized
cybercrime is the second thread actor whose target is the enterprises and motivation
are the financial gain and profits along with the best defense are the good cyber
hygiene. Hacktivist is the third threat actor whose target is the government entities
and corporations and motivations are the political and environmental causes which
have the best defense of understanding the TTP.

Current trends
Identify and describe trends in cyber attacks, including the impact
of cyber threat vectors
Current trends in cyber attack which the hacker chooses to fulfill their
negative intentions. For example threat vectors which includes
malware and phishing along with the man in the middle attacks and
denial of service attack which is followed by the SQL injections and
zero day exploit and also the password attack. Moreover and other
trends of Cyber attack are the cross site scripting and dive by
download and many more (Shaukat, Luo, Varadharajan and Li, 2020).

Untargeted and targeted
attacks
List and provide at least one example for each of the categories of
vulnerabilities used in:
Untargeted cyber attacks
Un targeted attacks are the attacks in which the attackers indiscriminately
focus on the devices and services. They don't know about the victims and
the vulnerabilities will be the large number of machines and services
owned or provided by the organizations. malware is one of the examples
which includes the worms and computer viruses along with the Trojan
horses and spyware (Torres, Comesaña and Garcia-Nieto, 2019).

Malware attacks
Demonstrate and describe how malware exploits un-patched
systems
Malware is the software which is specially designed to damage and
destroy the computer systems in the form of viruses and Trojan
viruses and ransomware. They exploit the unpatched systems by
creating the more vulnerable software so that the other creatures
such as worms and spyware can easily attack the systems with
the bad intention (Le, Kumar, Mishra and Khari, 2019).

How the antivirus solution scans the
system

The detection of the EICAR ‘virus’ by
the antivirus solution

Description of the file

How the antivirus solution deals with the detected
threat (quarantine/recommendations/etc.)

Typical infection methods for
ransom ware style virus or malware

Attacks against network
perimeter and end users
Describe techniques used by attackers to infiltrate and escalate privileges.
Include techniques that attack the perimeter as well as end users
There are various techniques which are used by the attackers to infiltrate and
escalate the privileges. For example, if a password is weak then it can easily
access and retrieve the file which is confidential for the organization or for the
individual. Moreover, attackers process the weak permissions and sensitive
information stored in the shared folders. They also preload the dll files. These
are the techniques which are the parameters used by the attackers (Alqahtani,
Sarker, Kalim and Hossain, 2020).

Wireless vulnerabilities
Describe one example of how wireless WPA2 can be hacked
Wireless wpa2 can be hacked by attacking the Wi-Fi networks
with the help of injection malicious data into the unencrypted
http connections. For example attack abuses to inject the
ransomware into websites on which the victim is visiting.
This can also be done by intercepting the data being
transmitted from one access point to another (Narayanan,
Ganesan, Joshi, Oates, Joshi and Finin, 2018).