Social Engineering Attack types and Precautions

Social Engineering Attack

Social engineering attacks are a form of psychological manipulation that exploits human behavior to trick individuals into giving away confidential information. These attacks can be carried out through various channels, including email, phone, social media, and in-person interactions. There are different types of social engineering attacks and how to protect ourselves from falling victim to them.

Types of Social Engineering Attacks

Phishing Attacks

Phishing attacks are the most common type of social engineering attack, and they involve the use of fraudulent emails or websites to trick individuals into giving away sensitive information, such as login credentials or credit card details. These emails or websites are designed to look like legitimate ones, often by replicating the logos and designs of well-known companies. Phishing attacks can also be carried out through phone calls or text messages.

Pretexting Attacks

Pretexting attacks involve the use of a fabricated story to convince an individual to disclose sensitive information. The attacker might pose as someone in authority, such as a bank employee or a company executive, and use the fabricated story to convince the victim to share confidential information.

Baiting Attacks

Baiting attacks involve the use of physical or digital media to lure individuals into disclosing sensitive information. For example, an attacker might leave a USB drive lying around in a public place, hoping that someone will pick it up and plug it into their computer. The USB drive might contain malware that can steal sensitive information from the victim's computer.

Spear Phishing Attacks

Spear phishing attacks are similar to phishing attacks, but they are targeted at specific individuals or groups. The attacker will research their target and craft a personalized email or message to make it seem more convincing. The goal is to trick the victim into divulging sensitive information or clicking on a malicious link.

Tailgating Attacks

Tailgating attacks involve the physical manipulation of individuals to gain access to restricted areas. The attacker might pose as an employee or a delivery person and follow someone into a restricted area. Once inside, they can steal sensitive information or carry out other malicious activities.

How to Protect Ourself from Social Engineering Attacks

Be cautious of unsolicited emails or messages. If an email or message seems too good to be true or asks for sensitive information, it is probably a social engineering attack.

Verify the identity of the person or organization before giving away any sensitive information. If you receive a phone call or message from someone claiming to be from your bank, for example, call the bank directly to verify their identity.

Install and regularly update anti-virus and anti-malware software on your devices.

Use strong passwords and enable two-factor authentication on your accounts.

Be mindful of what you post on social media. Avoid sharing personal information that could be used by attackers to carry out social engineering attacks.

Educate yourself and your employees about social engineering attacks. Awareness and training are key to preventing social engineering attacks.

In conclusion, social engineering attacks are a real threat in today's digital age. The best way to protect yourself is to be aware of the different types of social engineering attacks and to take proactive measures to prevent them.

What is Cross Site Scripting?

Cross-Site Scripting Attacker inserts malicious code into an application, when regular users request the webpage it returns the malicious page and the attacker gains control over user data via code he injects.

Countermeasure

Safely validating untrusted HTML input

Cookie security

Disabling scripts

What is Dictionary Attacks?

 

A dictionary attack is a brute-force technique where attackers run through common words and phrases, such as those from a dictionary, to guess passwords. It is also known as dictionary password attack. 

Most people use real words as passwords.

Trying all dictionary words and makes the attack much faster.

Hackers and spammers attempt to log in to a computer system by trying all possible passwords until the correct one is found.

Countermeasures

Lockout a user after X no of  failed login attempts

Not using Dictionary words as passwords

What is Fraggle Attacks?

 

A Fraggle attack is exactly the same as a smurf attack, except that it uses the user datagram protocol, or UDP, rather than the more common transmission control protocol, or TCP. Fraggle attacks, like smurf attacks, are starting to become outdated and are commonly stopped by most firewalls or routers.

The attacker sends UDP packets to the random ports of the victim host. The victim will check for application listening on the port and reply with the "ICMP destination unreachable" packet.

The attacker can spoof the IP address of the UDP packets so that no one can trace it back.

Countermeasures

Close all unused ports.

What is Smurf Attack?

 

A smurf attack is a form of a distributed denial-of-service attack that renders computer networks inoperable

The Smurf program accomplishes this by exploiting vulnerabilities of the Internet Protocol (IP) and Internet Control Message Protocols (ICMP).

Huge numbers of ICMP requests are sent to the victim's IP address.

The source and destination IP address is spoofed. The hosts on the victim's network respond to the ICMP requests.

This creates a significant amount of traffic on the victim’s network, resulting in the consumption of bandwidth and ultimately causing the victim’s server to crash.

Countermeasures

Configure individual hosts and routers to not respond to ICMP requests or broadcasts; or

Configure routers to not forward packets directed to broadcast addresses.

What is Brute Force Attack?

Brute Force Attack

A brute-force attack consists of an attacker trying many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly.

The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found.

When password guessing, this method is very fast when used to check all short passwords.

There is a computer program run automatically to get the password.

The most basic brute force attack is a dictionary attack, where the attacker works through a dictionary of possible passwords and tries them all.

Countermeasures

• Account Lockout - You Have Implemented Account Lockout With A Clipping Level Of 4

• Strong Passwords -  A strong password must be at least 12 characters long and should consist of a random collection of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.

• Implement Captcha - It is used to differentiate between real users and automated users, such as bots.

What is Man-In-The-Middle Attack?

 

Man-In-The-Middle Attack AKA MITM

It is an attack where the attacker secretly relays and possibly alters the communication between two parties who believe they are directly communicating with each other.

Countermeasures

• Digital Signature - A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents.

• Mutual authentication - Mutual authentication, also known as two-way authentication, is a security process in which entities authenticate each other before actual communication occurs.

What is an Cyber Attack?

Cyber Attack

A cyber attack is an attempt to destroy, expose, alter, disable, steal or gain unauthorized access to or make unauthorized use of an asset. Without proper security measures and controls in place, our data might be subjected to an attack. 

Some attacks are passive, meaning information is monitored; others are active, meaning the information is altered with intent to corrupt or destroy the data or the network itself.

The attack is not only from the side of external individuals but, it is also from internal sources.

Seven Tools For Every Hacker

1. Nmap
Nmap (Network Mapper) is a free open source utility for network exploration or security auditing. It was designed to rapidly scan large networks, although it works fine against single hosts. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use,and dozens of other characteristics. It may be used to discover computers and services on a computer network, thus creating a "map" of the network.Nmap runs on most types of computers and both console and graphical versions are available. Nmap is free and open source.

2. Nessus Remote Security Scanner

Works with a client-server framework. Nessus is the worlds most popular vulnerability scanner used in over 75,000 organizations world-wide. Many of the worlds largest organizations are realizing significant cost savings by using Nessus to audit business-critical enterprise devices and applications.

3. Wireshark
Wireshark is a GTK+-based network protocol analyzer, or sniffer, that lets you capture and interactively browse the contents of network frames. The goal of the project is to create a commercial-quality analyzer for Unix and to give Wireshark features that are missing from closed-source sniffers. Works great on both Linux and Windows (with a GUI), easy to use and can reconstruct TCP/IP Streams! .

4. Cain and Abel
The swiss knife of hacking tools. Cain & Abel is a password recovery tool for Microsoft Operating Systems. It allows easy recovery of various kind of passwords by sniffing the network, cracking encrypted passwords using Dictionary, Brute-Force and Cryptanalysis attacks, recording VoIP conversations, decoding scrambled passwords, revealing password boxes, uncovering cached passwords and analyzing routing protocols.The program does not exploit any software vulnerabilities or bugs that could not be fixed with little effort.

5. Kismet
Kismet is an 802.11 layer2 wireless network detector, sniffer, and intrusion detection system. Kismet will work with any wireless card which supports raw monitoring (rfmon) mode, and can sniff 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g traffic. A good wireless tool as long as your card supports rfmon

6. NetStumbler
It is decent wireless tool for Windows! Sadly not as powerful as it’s Linux counterparts, but it’s easy to use and has a nice interface, good for the basics of war-driving. NetStumbler is a tool for Windows that allows you to detect Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) using 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. It has many uses: Verify that your network is set up the way you intended.
Find locations with poor coverage in your WLAN. Detect other networks that may be causing interference on your network. Detect unauthorized rogue access points in your workplace. Help aim directional antennas for long-haul WLAN links. Use it recreationally for WarDriving.

7. SuperScan
Powerful TCP port scanner, pinger, resolver. SuperScan 4.1 is an update of the highly popular Windows port scanning tool, SuperScan. If you need an alternative for nmap on Windows with a decent interface, I suggest you check this out, it’s pretty nice.

Types of Attacks in Hacking

Operating System Attack : Operating system attack is attack done on specific type of OS. Such attack is done using flaws in programs and services shipped with OS.

Application level Attack : Application level attack is done over faulty coding practices done over software during its development.

Shrink Wrap Code Attack : Shrink Wrap Code attack are attacks done over UN-refined scripts used for making task simpler.

Misconfiguration Attack : misconfiguration attack, it is kinda attack which is done over mis-configured system or a system with default settings.

Terminologies Used Under Hacking

Threat: A threat is an environment or situation that could lead to a potential

breach of security. Ethical hackers look for and prioritize threats when

performing a security analysis.

An Exploit: An exploit is a piece of software that takes advantage of a bug,

glitch, or vulnerability, leading to unauthorized access, privilege escalation, or

denial of service on a computer system.

Vulnerability: A vulnerability is an existence of a software flaw, logic design,

or implementation error that can lead to an unexpected and undesirable

event executing bad or damaging instructions to the system. In easy word

vulnerability is weakness in system.

Payload: Payload is agent that helps in taking advantage of vulnerability in

remote hacking.

Attack: An attack occurs when a system is compromised based on a vulnerability.

Types of Hacking

Local Hacking: This type of hacking is done when a hacker has full access to

the system to implant a virus, keylogger and RATs.

Remote Hacking: Remote hacking is done on a remote system using

Internet.

Social Engineering: Social Engineering is kind of interacting skill that a hacker

uses to manipulate people giving out sensitive information. Its kind of trick

done using good verbal, social skills and understanding.

How to Become a Hacker

If you want to make your career in hacking then you must have these skills.

You must have the complete software knowledge and a little of hardware is enough. You must understand how the hardware stuff works, the hard disk, the RAM and the most important the mother board.

You need to have a very good programming skills. Because you can break it only when you can make it. You need to know all the scripting languages, most of them.

These are few programming and scripting languages which a hacker must have a sound knowledge on!

1. C++ programming

2. JavaScript

3. Python programming

4. MySQL

5. PHP

6. Perl and Pascal

7. Assembly language

8. Basics of HTML, CSS, ASP  and Java

Now suppose, you know all of the stuff which I have mentioned above, you thing you are a hacker now?. No, not at all you just are a programmer not a hacker yet. What I mean is you just learn to make it not to break yet.

So what’s your next step? It's to go ahead and experiment on these stuff, remember to be creative every time you start experimenting!

The Difference between A Programmer, A Hacker and A Developer

A Programmer is someone who can solve problems by manipulating computer code. They can have a wide range of skill levels from just being “ok” with basic scripting to being an absolute sorcerer with any language.

A Hacker is someone who makes things. In this context, it’s someone who makes things by programming computers. This is the original, and purest definition of the term, i.e., that you have an idea and you “hack” something together to make it work. It also applies to people who modify things to significantly change their functionality, but less so.

A Developer is a formally trained programmer. They don’t just solve problems or create things, but do so in accordance with a set of design and implementation principles. These include things like performance, maintainability, scale, robustness, and (ideally) security.

Types of Hackers

White Hat

          A white hat hacker is a computer and network expert who attacks a security system on behalf of its owners or as a hobby, seeking vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit. Instead of taking malicious advantage of exploits, a white hat hacker notifies the system's owners to fix the breach before it is can be taken advantage of.

Black Hat

          A black hat is a person who compromises the security of a computer system without permission from an authorized party, typically with malicious intent. A black hat will maintain knowledge of the vulnerabilities and exploits they find for a private advantage, not revealing them to the public or the manufacturer for correction.

Grey Hat

          A grey hat is a skilled hacker who sometimes will act legally and other times may not. They are a cross between white hat and black hat hackers. They usually do not hack for personal gain or have malicious intentions, but may or may not occasionally commit crimes during the course of their technological exploits.

Who is Hacker?

Hacker

A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal working of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.

A person who enjoys learning details of a programming language or system.

A person who enjoys actually doing the programming rather than just theorizing about it.

A person who picks up programming quickly.

A person who is an expert at a particular programming language or system.