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Phases of Attack from a Hacker

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Phases of Attack from a Hacker

There are five phases that a hacker will go thru when trying to attack your system. Each one is different and requires different ways to limit the hacker’s ability to gain information about your system.
The first phase is reconnaissance, this can be passive or active. One of the things that a hacker might try is social engineering to gain information on the system. The best way to combat this, is by training and more training of the employees on the various ways that a hacker will attempt to get information. There is also dumpster diving, the only way to combat this is to make sure that the information that is being of disposed is of such a nature that it is useless to them. Information that they could use to gain access to the system, should be destroyed in such a way that it cannot be reconstructed in any way. Also a hacker could try sniffing the network, this is where system hardening will assist in preventing the hacker from gaining information.
The second phase is scanning, in this phase the hacker will try to scan the network to see what information he can obtain to assist him in determining what weakness exist. This scanning he can find out such information as to what type of OS is being used, the version of the OS, and many other things about the network. To help prevent him from getting this information, system hardening is the best defense. This will include but not limited to disabling all ports but those that are needed, turning off certain ICMP features which give out information. The use of firewalls and access list are also helpful.
Gaining Access, is just what it name implies. This is where the hacker attempts to use the information that he has gather in the first two phases to access the network. He may only have information on someone other than the network admin, but this does not stop him, since he know of ways to use as a stepping stone to getting root access. This is where the current patches, hot fixes and updates have in place. Also...

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