Ethical Hacking and Penetration Testing Report - Course Name

This report provides an overview of ethical hacking and penetration testing, focusing on the distinctions between authenticated and unauthenticated attacks. It details the nature of authenticated attacks, which involve the use of login credentials to access a system, and unauthenticated attacks, which bypass the need for authorization. The report provides examples of authenticated attacks, such as brute force, which attempts to guess passwords, and insufficient authentication, which exploits weaknesses in the authentication process. It also outlines unauthenticated attacks, including reconnaissance attacks, which gather information about the target system, and phishing attacks, which trick users into revealing sensitive data. The report emphasizes the importance of understanding these attack methods for enhancing cybersecurity measures.

Running head: ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
Name of the Student
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Author Note

1ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
Discussions
The comparison between the authenticated and unauthenticated attacks is as follows:
Authenticated attacks: The authenticated attacks target the procedure of authentication of a
website. This attack utilizes the site that an individual utilised in order to verify the identity
while accessing a service or an application (Gope, Lee & Quek, 2016). Someone who is
trusted carries out an authenticated attack. The attacker gets the admittance to the login
details of a person, log into the system and then executes the attack. The people executing the
authenticated attacks use the password and the username of an individual in order to prove
their identity.
Unauthenticated attacks: The unauthenticated attacks are the procedures of exploring the
weaknesses of a system of network without the requirement to log in as a user who is
authorized (Reed, 2016). The attackers who are malicious and want to gain admittance to the
crucial information of perform it without providing the authenticated details of login. The
unauthenticated attacks are in the contact forms and the carts of shopping. Most of the E-
commerce sites permit the user to fill the cart of shopping before they are given with the
details of login.
The two examples of authentication attacks are as follows:
Brute force: it permits an attacker to guess the password, username, credit card number or
the key of cryptography by utilising an automated procedure of trial and error (Stiawan et
al.,2019).
Insufficient authentication: It permit an attacker to gain admittance to a website that consist
of sensitive contents or sensitive functions without having to appropriately authenticate with
the website

2ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
The two examples of unauthenticated attacks are as follows:
Reconnaissance attack: In this kind of attack, the attackers collect various information about
the system that is targeted and in most of the cases preceded a DoS attack.
Phishing attack: It is a kind of attack that is utilised to pinch data of the user. The data of the
user include login details and many more (Gupta, Singhal & Kapoor, 2016). It happens when
the attack who is masquerading as an entity that is trusted fools a sufferer into opening an
email or a text message and many more.

3ETHICAL HACKING AND PENETRATION TESTING
References
Gope, P., Lee, J., & Quek, T. Q. (2016). Resilience of DoS attacks in designing anonymous
user authentication protocol for wireless sensor networks. IEEE Sensors
journal, 17(2), 498-503.
Gupta, S., Singhal, A., & Kapoor, A. (2016, April). A literature survey on social engineering
attacks: Phishing attack. In 2016 international conference on computing,
communication and automation (ICCCA) (pp. 537-540). IEEE.
Reed, T. (2016). Defending, Detecting, and Responding to Hardware and Firmware Attacks.
Stiawan, D., Idris, M., Malik, R. F., Nurmaini, S., Alsharif, N., & Budiarto, R. (2019).
Investigating Brute Force Attack Patterns in IoT Network. Journal of Electrical and
Computer Engineering, 2019.