IT Security Attacks

Saleem Abbas
Nov 1 · 4 min read

IT security nowadays is a big concern of many industries e.g financial industry, trading industry, banking industry, social business industry, etc.

IT Security plays its vital role almost in every industry where the protection of information and information systems is concerned. I would like to briefly explain here different threats in cybersecurity and information security. I am not an IT Security expert but will try to explain whatever I know in this particular domain.

AIMS of IT Security?

  1. Confidentiality: The protection of information and information systems against unauthorized access is known as confidentiality. e.g the message sent by A to B then C should not be able to see the communication. Another way the information or message should be encrypted.
  2. Integrity: The protection of information and information systems against unauthorized modification. e.g Information altered by only legitimate users, nobody else should have rights to change or do any sort of modifications in file or folder etc.
  3. Availability: ensures the availability of resources to only the authorized group or persons. e.g Amazon downtime.
  4. Authentication: clear identification of the sender or communication peers. if A is talking to B then B should know that B is actually talking to A. e.g Digitial signature in digital certificates.
  5. Non-Repudiation: Repude meaning deny or reject and non-repudiation means unable to reject the fact. Another way of describing non-repudiation is if A sends something to B and then A says I did not send it then B should be able to prove that A sent and that cannot deny. e.g digital signature.
  6. Authorization: Only legitimate persons should be able to access information or information systems. e.g file access control in Linux used to authorize resources to only legitimate users by read, write and execute permissions.

Threats in IT Security

there are a few common threats in IT security.

Let's take an example of Client and Server to understand these threats in a more understandable way.

  1. Intercept: if a client is sending a request to a server to fetch email, or image e.t.c and an attacker using Wireshark or any other web traffic listening tool, can see the information sent by the client to the server or another way around then this kind of attack is called Intercept. confidentiality is compromised.
  2. Manipulate: if a client is sending a request to fetch an image from a server and an attacker somehow manages to listen to traffic as well as modify the request or response from the server then this attack is so-called manipulate. This compromises the second aim of IT security that is Integrity.
  3. Spoof: if the client is sending a request to a web server or FTP server to fetch some sort of information then somehow if an attacker manages to not even intercept but also manipulate and behave like a server but the client does not know. there are many examples of Spoofing attacks e.g ARP Spoofing, DNS Spoofing, IP Spoofing. In the nutshell, ARP Spooning is whenever a client wanna commnicate with the server or another machine then client generates ARP request in order to know the mac address of the corresponding machine but attacher somehow manage to respond the machine with his own machine mac address for requested IP address.
  4. Disrupt: This attack says if you cannot hack it break it. Simple if the client is requesting to server and server sends the response to the client. Then if an attacker is unable to intercept, manipulate or spoof the traffic then break the traffic somehow such that the client cannot communicate further with the server machine.
  5. Man in the Middle Attack: In public-key cryptography, this is one of the popular attacks among others so I would like to explain briefly. Before understanding this attack need to know public-key cryptography so what is that? Simply let's say Alice wanna communicate with Bob such that the communication should be encrypted and confidential. Alice and Bob generate key pair private key and public key. Both keys function in such a way that one key used for encryption and another used to decryption purpose. public-key remains public everybody can access but private keys are accessible by only the owner of the key. Now if Alice wanna communicate with Bob then Alice will ask Bob please send me your public key so I can encrypt the message. Bob will use the private key to decrypt the message and the same things work in another way around for encryption and decryption. Now Man in the middle attacks happens when somebody as a third party or hacker generates own key pair. Alice asks Bob to send me your public key. Now man in the middle as hacker comes into play and sends back to Alice his own public key. Alice does not know the key is actually sent by Bob so Alice encrypts the message and sends it. Now again attacher intercepts the message decrypts with his own private key and manipulates the message then sends it to Bob. The same thing happens with Bob if bob wanna communicate with Alice. Bob will ask to send me your public key then attacker again intercepts and redo the action.

I will explain other attacks in detail in the coming stories. this was just in nutshell the basics of IT Security attacks and aims.


Written by

Senior iOS Developer , Research assistant in Fraunhofer Secure Information Technology Darmstadt Germany , iOS Frameworks Expert

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