Guarding Your Network: A Guide to the Most Notorious Types of Cyber Attacks

Network attacks are no longer a distant threat but a daily reality for individuals and businesses alike. For instance, imagine your network as a fortress under constant siege—every vulnerability could be a potential entry point for the attackers. Now, just like a fortress every network has several weak points and every poorly guarded entrance serves as a vulnerability, there are several ways to guard a network as discussed in an earlier post. But to be on the safer side of this intricate dance between innovation and risk, we need to upgrade our knowledge about the types of attacks we should be protecting our network from. We’ll dissect each type of network attack and the necessary precautions for safeguarding our network in this post.

The post has following contents:

1. What are Network Attacks?
2. Types of Network Attacks
   

   • Denial of Service attack (DOS)
   • Man in the middle attacks (MITM)
   • Malware attack
   • Password attack
   • Ransomware attack

3. Summary

What are Network Attacks?

In simple terms a “network attack” refers to any attempt to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data or devices within a network. These attacks can target the network itself or the devices and the data flowing through it. Although these attacks are not easily performed most of them require hands-on knowledge/experience, but at present with the amount of information available online anyone can attempt to swoop. To give you an idea, let’s talk about SCRIPT KIDDIES, they are unskilled beginners (usually kids) who do not have the required knowledge or experience about coding in particular but based on the information and codes available online they attempt to hack and mostly succeed but for a short period of time, but they tend to get caught easily due to their lack of full knowledge about the subject, in a very similar way based on the information present online plenty of network attacks can be performed. So, to be prepared let’s dwell into the types of network attacks.

Types of Network Attacks

These attacks do not have a limit or a particular number, so here we’ll learn about a few basic attacks that are also most common and will help you get some knowledge about how such attacks are carried out. Let’s dive in the following:

1.  Denial of Service attack (DOS)
2.  Man in the middle attacks (MITM)
3.  Malware attack
4.  Password attack
5.  Ransomware attack

 Now, we’ll unpack each attack one by one.

1. Denial of Service (DOS) Attack

• A DOS attack is a malicious attempt to disrupt the network’s functioning by increasing the traffic. Let’s break it down in simpler words- Think of your network as an empty/less used road, now imagine if all the traffic is suddenly diverted towards this road what would happen? The road will be flooded with cars and it will be hard to move, that is what a DOS attack is. It diverts the traffic to a particular network/device, disrupting all the functions and causing chaos. The attack is often carried out by one system but it can be carried out by multiple in this case the attack is called Distributed Denial of Service attack.
• PRECAUTIONS: In order to mitigate such attacks here are some tips
  

  1. Updating your systems and software regularly can help patch the vulnerabilities that the attackers try to target. Thus, making the system/software impenetrable.
  2. In order to protect our systems/software from any unwanted intrusion, installing a firewall, an intrusion prevention system (IPS) and an intrusion detection system (IDS) are known to be very helpful.
  3. Employing load distributers is also helpful in mitigating a DOS attack. A load distributer, distributes the traffic among various servers and makes sure that one server is not being overcrowded.

2. Man In The Middle (MITM) Attack

• A MITM attack is a form of hijacking attack, where the attacker overhears/eavesdrops the communication between two parties (without them knowing). By hijacking the conversation an attacker can either manipulate it or add suspicious/malicious content in the ongoing conversation. These attacks are mostly done via packet sniffing (which is like eavesdropping on digital conversations), DNS spoofing (pretending to be a trusted website) or session hijacking (taking over someone’s login session without them knowing). A MitM attack may also be referred to as an EAVESDROPPING ATTACK or SNIFFING, which involves to same process of hijacking the conversation between two parties without their knowledge of consent.
• PRECAUTIONS: To mitigate the risk of a MitM attack it is advised to; use encrypted servers for conversation (Encryption refers to converting the human readable text to a computer-based language, so that it can only be read by the receiver.), employ strong network protocols and use strong authentication servers (using 2FA is beneficial.).

3. Malware Attacks

• These attacks are caused to infiltrate, damage and gain unauthorized access to a system, network or device. Malware attacks include injecting a system with virus, trojans, worms, etc. While most of these attacks are easy to recognize & can be stopped easily, technology is an ever evolving platform so, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there is a virus or worm somewhere in your device infiltrating the data as you read this. We’ll unpack more on types of viruses in our upcoming blogs.
• PRECAUTIONS: Protecting your system/network/device from malware attacks is no sweat. The following are tips you could use
  

  1. Updating your device/software regularly is the key to maintaining its safety, as it helps patch up the vulnerabilities present.
  2.  Installing a good & renowned ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE is another way of ensuring your device is protected. Being fully aware about the antiviruses before installing them is the most important part, as some of these applications today are used by attackers to gain unauthorized access to the device.
  3. Having a BACKUP of all the data present in your device acts as a defense mechanism.
  4. Keeping up with the evolving viruses and having a good knowledge about them while browsing a website. In simple words, educating yourself about the ways malware attacks can be attempted help with being safe.

4. Password Attacks

• We know passwords are a secure way of protecting your data, but what if someone cracks your passwords? Till date there are very few passwords that are thoroughly able to protect data, so this makes password attacks the most common attacks on software, systems, network and devices. There are different types of password attacks but for a beginner knowledge let’s delve into 3 most common types i.e BRUTE FORCE ATTACK, DICTIONARY ATTACK and PHISHING.
  

  • Brute force attack is where the attacker tries all combinations of characters and numbers to guess the password, this attack is time consuming but is effective if the password is short & weak.
  • Dictionary attack is a method hackers use to guess your password by trying out a list of common words and phrases—just like flipping through a dictionary.
    Since many people use simple or predictable passwords (like “password123” or “letmein”), attackers use ready-made lists of these to break into accounts faster than guessing random combinations..
  • A Phishing attack has a lot of types but in general a phishing attack refers to social engineering i.e phishing attacks attempt on tricking the user into providing his/her own password by pretending to be bank or by winning the trust of the user.

• PRECAUTIONS: Now, in order to mitigate a password attack a user needs to put in strong passwords which are minimum 8 characters long and contains numbers, special characters and alphabets. Also, being aware of phishing attempts is a necessary precaution. Certain regular changes like regularly updating passwords and implementing 2FA are also helpful.

5. Ransomware Attack

• These attacks are generally counted under MALWARE ATTACKS but are different than viruses, trojans and worms. A Ransomware attack takes place in various forms including unknown emails, suspicious text messages, etc. The attacker may send an email or a message containing a link or an attachment, when the user clicks on either, their data automatically reaches the attacker. Then the attacker encrypts the data, thus taking control in his hands and the data is provided to the user in return of a ransom (generally money). Due to these attacks many companies suffer great losses and their website faces a huge downtime.
• PRECAUTIONS: The safety measures needed to protect against a ransomware attack are very similar to Malware attacks. Although it is advised to never pay ransom for the data, even though paying ransom may seem like the easy way out but there is no guarantee that your data will be returned, instead it is advised to focus on the backups and incident response measures.

Summary

• There are a lot of different types of network attacks and each is vicious in its own way, the only way to protect our network/system/software/devices from such attacks is to keeping updating them regularly this helps to patch the vulnerabilities present & also, keeping ourselves educated about the evolving field of technology is helpful.
• The 5 attacks mentioned about are just basic attacks, the number of cases of these attacks are increasing day-by-day so it is important to be aware and practice the necessary precautions to be secure.