The 5 Most Common Ways Hackers Use to Hack Your Site
What is the common thing between Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Drupal, NBC, and Facebook?
Well, they all got hacked at some stage of their services.
No doubts that the developers have made an enormous leap in developing advances and interactive codes but so have the hackers. Presently, the hackers have gained knowledge and skill to bypass even the most advanced protocol or at least develop viruses to do it.
So in this article, we will have a look at the various ways which a professional hacker whether a Blackhat, Whitehat, or Greyhat use to get inside networks. It will help you to understand the parts that make a code vulnerable and design protocols to enhance its security.
1. Phishing
According to WebEagle CEO, Akram Artoul, the simplest way to steal your personal information is to make you fill them. The technique is called phishing.
In this process, a hacker uses social engineering techniques to design emails, masquerades them as legitimate and send to a target user. Often these emails show a well-recognized figure like a known company, bank or other trustable firms as the sender. For a regular internet user, the email will look quite genuine, so he or she will open and follow.
The mail will show something like blocked id, credit card, or something else and ask you to fill in details for verification. Once you fill in the details, the data belongs to the hacker; he/she will have free-access to use it.
In some cases, hackers can also use an attachment instead of urgency texts and links. This attachment will contain malware which will get installed into your system as soon as to download it. The hacker can then access not only the card details but your whole device through this malware.
2. UI Redress
UI redress attack or the clickjacking is very similar to the phishing, but in this case, the hacker uses a user interface for hijacking the data.
The hacker creates multiple transparent layers to direct the user’s action to his/her required destination. This technique is a bit complicated, so let’s consider an example for a general video downloading site (non-trusted site).
Now, the one sure thing about this page is that you and every user on this website will click on the download button. Therefore, the hacker creates a button which downloads a virus to your computer or set it over the download button. The person will then turn this directing button to transparent and wait for the user to click on it.
You, unaware of the transparent layer, will try to click on the download button and will unknowingly download the malicious code.
3. SQL Injection
SQL scripts are a part of the most newly developed website and application. You need them to store input data and create website databases.
However, there are often some weak parts in this SQL database and library which the hackers can exploit by tampering with the codes. He/she can check the data for vulnerability and the use the weak spot for injecting a malicious input into the SQL statements. It will grant them access to read sensitive data, modify databases, execute administrative actions, recover the content of the DBMS file system, and a lot more.
Akram Artoul and his team say that a hacker can use SQL injection to spoof identity, tamper with data, cause repudiation issues, make the data unavailable and more. In the worst scenario, the injection can also provide the hacker with administrative right over the website along with the privilege to make master changes like admin password and credential.
4. Brute Force
Brute force is a hit and trial type of hacking technique. In this, the hacker gathers information about the network administrator and uses them to guess password. They use special software which inputs the details and then use them to generate all the possible combination of password that you can use.
This technique is a preferable choice as a majority of users and developers don’t pay much attention to password strength. In fact, WebEagle CEO Akram Artoul says that there are users who still use common phrases like ‘1234’ or their birth date as the password.
The hackers use this technique to get inside a system which has robust protection against malware and other infection sources. It is slow and risky, but it does not need a weak spot in the system, which is one of its most significant leverage over every other hacking technique.
5. DDoS/DoS
DDoS stands for Distributed Denial of Services. This technique is not much of a website hacking process, but it’s a way of crashing a whole server.
In this case, a hacker infects the IoT device and small user of a network and takes control over their sending/receiving data. In technical terms, they turn the devices to bots or zombies. Once everything is in place, the hacker commands these bots to send requests and share data with a targeted server. They overflow the data stream, overload the server, and cause the server to crash. As a result, the website shuts, and the users lose access to it.
Akram Artoul and his team reveal that this attack is intense as the bots are basically some legitimate devices, so it’s challenging to separate infected parts from the non-infected once.
Conclusion
There are a lot of methods that cybercriminal or an ethical hacker can use to enter your system, but each one of them comes with its own challenges and requirement. The once that are high on performance are complicated, while the less complicated ones don’t work accurately.
However, the above methods offer a blend of both these qualities. They are relatively less complicated to implement and have a high success rate.
Now that you know about them, you can use the knowledge to create algorithms and security protocols that can combat them.
In case you need to more about these techniques or guidance with designing security systems for them, contact WebEagle. Akram Artoul and his team of experts will provide you all the needed resource and guidance for your work. They can help you with codes, frameworks, security layers, and all the other aspects to develop a highly interactive yet protected website.
