Common Attack Techniques – In an Era of Industrialized Hacking

Gone are the days when hackers attacked perimeter defences. Today their objective is to take control of confidential data and the applications which process them. Hacking is now an operation involving global coordination, sophisticated techniques and persistent teamwork. And with clear roles and responsibilities being defined in the community, hacking is now a highly organized, lucrative industry- whether we like it or not!

Like in any other industry, division of labor and specialization, have taken shape making the hacking industry more structured than ever before. The 3 key players in the hacking community are:

-Researchers: Otherwise known as exploit developers, researchers are not actually involved in exploiting systems, but look for vulnerabilities in frameworks and applications.

-Farmers: These are people who write botnet software to infect systems, and also maintain and increase the presence of botnets in the cyberspace. They probe applications to extract valuable data, execute password attacks, disseminate spam, and distribute malware.

-Dealers: They distribute malicious payloads. They also rent botnets for repeated, persistent attacks or targeted one-time attacks to extract sensitive information.

The sophisticated nature of today’s cyber attacks is a definite product of ‘hacking industrialization’. And the use of advanced hacking techniques has also contributed to a focus shift from stealing personal information and credit card numbers to stealing application credentials, for which 3 attack techniques have been identified as commonly used:

SQL Injections: Data theft is most commonly administered through this technique. IBM reported around 250,000 SQL injection attacks on websites around the world, everyday, between January and June 2009.

Denial of Service: This is an attack which is usually executed by blackmailing application owners to pay a ransom to free their application from an invasion of unwanted traffic.

Business Logic Attacks: In this type of attack, hackers target vulnerabilities in business logic. Unlike attacks targeted at application codes, these attacks often remain undetected. These attacks are not usually apparent and are too diverse to be expressed in vulnerability scanner tests.

These highly advanced security attacks make it increasingly difficult for organizations to fight threats and remain protected. Today, no web application is out of reach of hackers. Attack campaigns are quite common, not only against applications but against any available target. Therefore data protection is a must, and effective vulnerability scanning tools along with application-level security solutions may be very helpful in effective threat management and overall security.