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Review of Cyber Attacks

In: Computers and Technology

Submitted By waitwhat
Words 1450
Pages 6
Help Net Security is a site (www.net-security.org) run specifically in order to help disseminate information about current security problems and concerns across the full spectrum of computing systems. According to “About” page, Help Net covers “news around the globe… technical articles and papers, vulnerabilities, various vendor advisories, latest viruses, malware and hosts the largest security software download area with software for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows Mobile.” The paper under review today is titled “Targeted Cyber Attacks”, written by the site GFI.com and published as an eBook available at Help net Security.
Targeted Cyber Attacks is an extensive, 25-page review of cyber attacks in a general sense, exposing the impact, extent of the problem, effectiveness of attacks, solutions and attack avoidance. It explains that the definition of a cyber attack is specifically when a company is attacked electronically for the purposes of gaining access to data or compromising functionality and causing denials of service.
The paper starts off with a definition of those who are actually at thread for attack – EVERY organization. The paper’s position is that all organizations are vulnerable, whether they believe it or not, and that there is no target too large or too small that can be attacked. Visibility of the company, perception of the ease of attack, and hiding their vulnerability from the public all have nothing to do with whether or not an attack will take place.
GFI explains how the actual extent of the problem is wide-ranged, consisting mainly of opportunistic (non-targeted) attacks such as Trojan horse programs, phishing scams, 419 scams, and mass-scanning for vulnerable services (which can transition to a targeted attack!). One test reported in the paper showed that an unprotected Windows-based system might be compromised by opportunistic

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