Cyber-Attacks: From Social Networking Sites to Secret Nuclear Facilities

The largest social network site has more than 500 million subscribers and it uses external e-mail services such as Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail etc. to help members find friends that are already part of the network. 

Those Mail-Accounts contains many confidential information of our real life and now a days also these social  networks are closely related to our real life. Data on nuclear generating facilities are also stored in the private sites of a country.

So, those data should be kept highly secure. A high level of Cyber-Security should be maintained there.

Introducing a comprehensive White House report on Cyber-Security released at the end of May, President Obama called Cyber-Security “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.”

But, this cyber-security is violated through many Cyber-Attacks.

Denial-of-Service (DoS):  

• Also known as distributed denial-of-service attack (DdoS), this involves criminals attempting to bring down or cripple individual websites, computers or networks often by flooding them with messages.

Malware:  

• Malicious software designed to take over individuals’ computers in order to spread a bug onto other people’s devices or social networking profiles. It can also infect a computer and turn it into part of a “botnet” – networks of computers controlled remotely by hackers known as “herders” to spread spam or viruses. 

Phishing:  

• Attacks designed to steal a person’s login and password details so that criminals can access their bank account or assume control of their social network. As many as 70 per cent of internet users use the same password for almost every web service they use making them vulnerable to identity theft if their details are stolen. 

Carders: 

• Criminals who use underground online forums to sell stolen bank or credit card details for as little as £1. Gangsters then employ “money mules” to use duplicate cards to withdraw cash at ATMs or in shops. 

Spoofing:

• A spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.