Examples of Technical Attacks:

Malware:

Malware is a malicious software that aims to damage or exploit computer systems. The following technologies that will be discussed are all examples of malware.

Viruses and Worms:

Viruses and worms are both self-replicating malware. As they infect systems, they can jump to different files or computers on the network on their own. The difference is that viruses will begin replicating upon being triggered by a human action, such as opening a file or clicking a button. Worms do not need this cue.

Other Malware:

• Ransomware: encrypts the victim’s data and will only provide a decryption key once a ransom is paid to the attacker (you will learn about encryption in course 5).
• Spyware: malware that sends a user’s personal information back to the attacker, such as login credentials.
• Adware: spams the victim with unwanted advertisements.
• Trojan: a malicious disguised as a good program to bait users into downloading it.

Other Attacks/Attack Concepts:

Amplification:

An amplification attack is a larger, or more numerous version of an existing attack. For example, a denial of service (DoS) attack spams a system with data packets and prevents it from operating via an overload of information. An amplified version of this is a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack, which is a barrage of DoS attacks from many sources.

Injection:

An injection attack is when malicious code is inputted, or “injected” into a program via search queries or user input queries. A popular example of this is a SQL injection. SQL (pronounced “sequel”) stands for structured query language, and is used to make and query databases. SQL code can be injected into search queries to return results that users may otherwise not be able to see.

In this next activity, we will walk through a SQL injection example and see how powerful they can be.