Ethical Hacker who are companies employ to exploit vulnerabilities. Ethical Hacking go by the names of security testers or penetration testers. Let identify 5 phases of ethical hacking is about.
Phases of An Attack
- Security breaches exploit and take advantage of vulnerability.
- Once exposed, the attacker collects confidential information and covers their tracks.
- Here is the list of phases of an attack
Reconnaissance
- In the reconnaissance phase, which is the planning phase, an attacker gather as much information as possible about the target.
- Plain old research may be first activity in this phase.
- The attacker can then move on to other reconnaissance methods such as dumpster diving or scanning.
- Consider the types of reconnaissance methods:
- Passive (where attacker does not interact with the system directly such as social engineering or dumpster diving).
- Active (which involves the attacker using tools to directly interact with system).
- The latter could include using tools detect open ports, router locations, network mapping and operating system details.
Scanning
- During the scanning phase, the attacker tries to identify specific vulnerabilities.
- Vulnerability scanners are the most widely used tools.
- Port scanners are used to recognize listening ports that provide clues to the typles of services that are running.
- Scanning is logical extension of the reconnaissance phase, but it involves more in-depth probing, which is considered an extension of active reconnaissance.
Gaining Access
- Gaining access is usually the goal of an attacker.
- However, keep in mind this is not always the case.
- A denial-of-service attack, for example, causes a resource to be unavailable, not necessary for an attacker to gain access to that resource in order to be successful.
- There are several factors affecting whether or not an attacker can successfully gain access, such as target system architecture and configuration, skill level or level of access gained.
Maintaining Access
- Once an attacker has successfully gained access, they need to maintain access through installing a backdoor or a rootkit.
- If not detected, attacker also removes any evidence of their breech by chaining the log files.
- An organization may employ an intrusion detection system (IDS) or a honeypot to detect potential intruders.
Covering Tracks
- Be ware that an attacker will erase all evidence of their presence.
- Tools such as Netcat or other trojans can be used to erase the evidence from log files.
- Other options include steganography, hiding data in other data, and tunneling (which carries one protocol in another).
In summary, an attack is a deliberate action taken against a target to affect the confidentially, integrity, availability or authenticity of the system. Attacks can be active or passive and can be initiated from within or outside the organization.
- Active attacks
- Alter a target system to affect privacy, credibility and accessibility.
- Passive attacks
- Breach the confidentiality of data of a system without impacting the system’s data
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