Sure it's important to know the enemy, and it's important then to kind of categorize the many attacks
that we might come up against in today's cyber security environment.
Think about it.
There are so many attacks, new ones being created every day.
We want to be able to easily classify these attacks so we can immediately describe them and from that
description, know some various parameters about exactly what's going on.
Now, I want you to understand, first off, that there are five classification of attacks according
to our kind of ethical hacking standards.
But keep in mind that this is going to be defined somewhat differently in different organizations.
And also keep in mind that a lot of times we will have an attack, fall into multiple classifications.
So we might say something like, oh, that was a passive attack against us.
And it was also a close in attack because they had close in physical proximity to the victim.
So first, just kind of get a sense for yeah, there's five of them classically we need to know.
This would be great material for flash cards, of course.
Passive attacks, active, close in insider and distribution.
Something else that we need to be able to do.
And you will get better at this as you move throughout this course, because we will go into depth on
these different examples, of course, but understand that we would want to be able to associate examples
with a particular categorization of attack.
So in the passive attack, which would be something that's being passively done against our data, like
intercepting it or monitoring it in this type of an attack, examples would be foot printing or sniffing,
eavesdropping, network traffic analysis or decryption.
So notice a passive attack.
Nothing's being altered.
But boy, oh boy, a lot's being gathered.
And this is often done during a reconnaissance type phase.
And again, we're going to go into great details on these different types of attacks, and you'll feel
a lot more comfortable with the specifics of them.
So if a passive attack is not altering the data in any way, then an active attack would be the opposite
of that.
So here data is being tampered with in some way.
Examples of its denial of service attacks, SQL injection, malware attacks, arbitrary code execution.
We'll be going into details of those throughout this course.
How about close in attacks?
Well, this does mean close physical proximity to the target.
So if someone has gotten access to a server closet with some key servers in it, this would be an example
of a close in attack.
I gave you two examples.
Dumpster diving and shoulder surfing.
And these are, of course, social engineering types of attacks.
So when we get close in to the organization and we're diving into the dumpster out back, we are trying
to obtain reconnaissance information.
If we're looking over the shoulder of our neighbor, then we're shoulder surfing.
I remember one office job I had.
It was so funny.
Every once in a while my cube mate, the person that would sit right next to me at the cubes, would
just stop working and start staring at my screen, start staring at what I was working on.
It was the funniest thing.
It didn't really bother to me too much, but I just realized now that I could have easily turned to
that individual and said, Could you stop shoulder surfing man?
So that is the technical term for that type of activity.
And of course, my neighbor in that case wasn't being malicious.
It's funny how that was his habit.
You know, take a break by staring at Anthony's computer screen.
Well, examples of insider attacks would be things like wiretapping and eavesdropping and theft of physical
devices.
This is when we have close physical proximity and we have trusted privileges.
Yikes.
Notice eavesdropping shows up again here when it showed up as a type of passive attack as well.
So a lot of times the attack can fall into multiple categories.
And finally, a distribution style of attack.
This is the tampering of the software or the hardware prior to or during the distribution.
So we might have an insider modify software during production.
Maybe they build in what's called a backdoor.
It's a modification of a patch during distribution.
We'll have to do a headline article on this because there have been some famous cases of this very scary
where patches or new software does get tampered with during distribution.
Yikes.
Well, thanks so much for watching this video where we discussed in detail these different classifications
of attacks.
It's important for us to know these, of course.