Five Most Dangerous Cyber Attacks & Latest Instances
There has been an abnormal increase in the number of Cyber Attacks in recent years. Cybercriminals with unauthorized access are penetrating into the information systems of business organizations. Recently, a South Carolina water company, Greenville Water had faced a cyberattack on its payment system on Wednesday, January 22, 2020. Company spokesperson Emerald Clark had stated in one of his statements that around 500,000 customers were affected in this attack.
Here we will introduce you to the world’s five most dangerous types of cyberattacks.
Denial-of-Service (DOS) attack is a type of cyberattack particularly based on a manipulative collaboration of various cybercriminals coming as they come together to penetrate into the websites through multiple IP addresses. In this type of attack, cybercriminals block users to make more service requests to the server through a particular medium like a website.
Impersonating the identity of the authorized account holders with the intent of performing phishing scams. In such attacks, attackers usually impersonate the identities of high-rank dignitaries like company CEOs, directors or department heads. So if someone is being sent an mail from his boss and asking to share some data related to their processes, the person should be attentive before getting ahead. Usually, these phishing attacks come in the form of malware traps and infect organizations’ information systems & networks with some dangerous viruses.
Man-in-the-Middle (MitM)
Man-in-the-Middle attacks happen because of an unauthorized interception between the two users by a third-party person. In such cryptography-based attacks, attackers would gain access to the information being shared in a private conversation of the users. This type of attack also utilizes a kind of personality impersonation as the malicious third-party user is typically understood as a trusted one who would relay information to an apt source. Most probably, the person at another end of the conversation would never receive the information sent from the sender as it gets seized by the attackers.
Malware
It is considered as one of the most severe types of cyberattacks and this is typically triggered by some malicious forms of software installed into the systems of an organization. This malicious software may contain viruses with the help of which hackers would gain complete control over the networks and information systems of an organization. Such malware can wipe all of the networks within an organization and can cause some serious damages to the most confidential assets. You can pursue a streaming course to learn about such attacks in depth.
Injection Attacks
Injection of some malicious literals of data to execute malicious commands is done to perform injection attacks. The most talked version of such types of attacks is SQL injection where attackers give a malicious SQL command to a website. Along with SQL, there are several other database languages such as XPath, LDAP, NoSQL, and XMLexploited to conduct injection attacks. Utilization of proper data validation and data sanitization are some effective ways to restrain these attacks on external inputs.
Data sanitization technique engages the filtering of data on the basis of user, API & Webservice and makes sure the interpreter is getting as the intended data. Data validation is a process to analyze input data against a predefined pattern and returning valid or invalid for any given types of input. Allowing users to enter phone numbers using digits from 0 to 9 is an example of data validation.
Cyber-attacks are devastating businesses of all sizes. About 75% of small businesses were projected to experience a data breach in the last year. There should be an awareness of Cyber Security to secure information assets within organizations which would come from educating people on security things with a Cyber Security training or certification programs.
Prominent Cyber Attacks on the World’s Leading Organizations
In recent months, many world-leading companies have gone through severe cyberattacks on their information systems. We discuss some of the most prominent incidents of cyberattacks here.
Denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on Wikipedia
World’s leading most popular information website ‘Wikipedia’ had confirmed a DDoS attack on September 7, 2019. The site had stopped working for a while however the issue was resolved by the Site Reliability Engineering team at Wikipedia. The United Kingdom became the first country to recognize and report the failure on the website followed by other European countries including Poland, France, Germany, and Italy.
Phishing attacks on Health Quest Systems
Health Quest Systems, a non-profit family of hospitals and healthcare centres also allegedly faced a phishing attack in May 2019. However, the attack was reported in April 2019 after a process of investigation. This attack was said to compromise the data of 28,910 patients such as their personal health information, contact details, and claims data.
Man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack on Apple iCloud
Apple’s iCloud service has also faced a tragic man-in-the-middle attack in China near before the launch of iPhone 6 in the country. As per a report of an anti-censorship organization, this attack was sponsored by Chinese authorities with other similar instances of attacks on leading technology companies functioning in the country such as Google, Yahoo, etc.
Malware Attack on Bahrain’s National Oil Company
Bahrain’s National Oil Company Bapco has gone through a severe malware attack in late December. It has been indicated that the attackers were from Iran on a state-sponsored mission. The attack was performed on December 29, 2019. There was a warning relayed by the National Cybersecurity Authority of Saudi Arabia, soon after that Bapco faced the attack.
Business leaders are focusing to engage secured workplaces on a priority basis. This analogy needs to be applied to business organizations of all sizes whether you are running a startup or a well-established company. There are so many threats in the world that may compromise your data with a single breach by exploiting a vulnerability present in the information systems of an organization. Modern technology can come up with more sophisticated solutions but it is also true that malicious techies can also utilize this technological evolvement.
