Our society is becoming more advanced, and the ongoing digitalization is bringing with it countless benefits. However, it makes us more vulnerable to the thousands of daily cyber-attacks on the web. In Module 6 “Agents of threat” of C1b3rWall Academy, Juanma Cabo Pimentel, Judicial Police investigator and head of the Cyberattack Group at the Central Cybercrime Unit discussed the types of cyberattacks that are most common in Spain and exaplined what their consequences are.
A cyberattack must be understood as the action, or a set of actions, that compromises the confidentiality, integrity or availability of a computer system or the information contained therein.
Most common cyberattacks
Juanma explains the most frequent cyberattacks in Spain.
Denial of service. There are several types:
PDos: Hardware sabotage. The attacker locks the device or blocks the firmware completely. The victim who suffers a PDoS attack has no choice but to repair the device or even buy a new one.
TDoS: DoS/DDoS against telephony service terminals. The attacker launches a large number of calls and keeps them active for as long as possible against the target network. Disrupts communications.
Man in the middle (MITM): consists of introducing a device or malware in the middle of the traffic to capture all communications, including banking information.
Brute-force attacks: this is a method of obtaining a password by trying all possible combinations until the one that allows access is found. It requires a lot of processing power and probability comes into play. It is usually combined with an attack, from which words are taken and introduced as passowrds.
Data theft: data is stolen from organizations and published on forums or social networks, or sold on the dark web. The main motivations are profit motives, animus laedendi or to increase the ego or fame of the person stealing the data.
Malware: this is the spearhead of cyber-attacks. It is a computer program that deploys a series of (negative) functionalities without the victim’s consent. The most common ones are banking Trojans and data-encrypting ransomware.
Ransomware: its objective is to block the use of the device or part of its information and demand a ransom in exchange for its release. There are blockers, which block the device’s functions, and encryption ransomware, which encrypts the contained data.
These are just some of the attacks we can fall victim to on the Internet. If you would like to learn a little more about this topic, don’t miss Juanma’s lecture on C1b3rWall Academy.
Here is the link to the full article published on News-365.
Juan M. Corchado 