Common Threats to End Users and Internet Services
Innovators and visionaries are two types of cybersecurity experts. These experts build different cyber domains of the Internet. They have the capability to find the power of data and bind it. They provide cybersecurity services and build special organizations for these services.
These organizations provide protection services to people from cyber attacks. These professionals must find threats and vulnerabilities because these are the main concerns of cybersecurity professionals. Two situations are critical:
- When there is the possibility of a threat.
- When vulnerability puts a target at risk of an attack.
For example, data in the hands of an unauthorized person can result in privacy loss for the owners, affect the credit of the owner, and put the career of the owner at risk. Google, Facebook, schools, hospitals, financial and government agencies, and e-commerce face the greatest risks for identity theft.
Large organizations like Google have the resources to hire top cybersecurity professionals to protect their servers and data. Many organizations build databases containing personal information about clients and people, and they need cybersecurity professionals, so the demand for cybersecurity professionals is increasing today. Cyber threats are unsafe for specific industries and the records they must keep up.
Types of Personal Records
The following are some examples of personal records from only a few sources.
Medical Records
Thieves can sell personal health information on the Internet black market. They can use personal medical credentials to get medical services and devices for themselves and others or bill insurance companies for phantom services in your name.
Patients’ electronic health record (HER ) includes physical health, mental health, and other personal information that may not be medically related. For example, a person may go to a checkup as a child because of major changes in the family. This will be somewhere in his medical history, so with a medical history and personal information, the record may also include information about that person’s family. Several laws shield patient records.
Many medical devices use the cloud platform to enable wireless transfer, storage, and display of clinical data like heart rates, blood pressure, and blood sugars. These medical devices can produce a huge amount of clinical data that can become part of a medical record.
Education Records
Education records include grades, test scores, attendance, courses taken, awards, degrees awarded, and disciplinary reports. The education record may also include contact information, health and vaccination records, and special education records, including individualized education programs (IEPs).
Employment and Financial Records
Employment records also include personal information, salary, and insurance information. Financial records are beautiful data for cybercriminals. They may contain income, expenditures, and credit card data. Tax records could include paycheck stubs, credit card statements, credit ratings, and banking information. Cybercriminals can use their credit cards to purchase or sell on the black market.
Authentication Details
The information about access to the online system is precious on the black market. This is the habit of a human using the same password for online accounts. So if someone manages to get hold of your Facebook or email password, they will mainly be able to log into any of your accounts.
Threats to Internet Services
There are many technical services needed for operating the Internet. The required services are routing, addressing, domain naming, and database management. Without these services, the Internet is not possible. These services of the Internet are also primary targets for cybercriminals.
Cybercriminals use a different technique to capture data streams over a network. These techniques put in danger all sensitive data, such as username, password, and credit card information.
These techniques included botnets, DDoS, hacking, malware, pharming, phishing, ransomware, spam, DNS Spoofing, and Man-in-the-Middle. Criminals also used these techniques to monitor and record all information coming across a network. Following is a short explanation of the above method.
Botnets
Botnets are largely undetected because they collect software robots, or ‘bots’, which create a group of infected computers known as’ zombies’. Zombies are remotely controlled by their originator. You may be one of them, and you may not even know it.
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS)
A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS attack, occurs when an infected user uses a network of zombie computers to sabotage a specific website or server.
The attack occurs when the malicious user tells all the zombie computers to connect to a particular server or website repeatedly. This increases the volume of traffic on that specific server or website, resulting in overloading that slows the server and website for legitimate users; sometimes, the website or server shuts down completely.
By using a malicious user computer, the attacker can also take advantage of security vulnerabilities and weaknesses and could take control of your computer. The attacks are “distributed” because the attacker uses several computers to launch the denial-of-service attacks.
Hacking
Hacking is an expression that explains actions someone takes to gain unauthorized access to a computer. It is a process by which cybercriminals gain access to any computer connected to the internet.
Pharming
Pharming is another type of online fraud. It means pointing the user to a malicious and illegitimate website and redirecting the legitimate URL to a fake website, even if the entered address is correct.
Phishing
Phishing is easy to execute and requires very little effort, so many cybercriminals use it. Criminals send fake emails and text messages and create websites that look authentic. They use email, messages, and websites to steal personal and financial information from users. This is spoofing.
Ransomware
Ransomware restricts access to the user’s computer and files. It is a type of malware that displays a message and demands payment to remove restrictions from the computer and files. An email with a malicious attachment and pop-up advertisement is the most common type of ransomware infection.
Spam
Spam is another standard method of sending information out and collecting it from unsuspecting people. Spam distributes unsolicited messages, advertising, or pornography to addresses that are easily available on the Internet through social sites, company websites, and personal blogs.
Spoofing
This technique is also used to associate with phishing in trying to steal information. Domain Name Service (DNS) translates an IP address into name and Domain name into IP address; such as www.networkustad-a2bb2f.ingress-alpha.ewp.live, into its numerical IP address and vice versa.
If a DNS server does not know the IP address of the required domain, it will ask another DNS server. Using DNS spoofing, the cybercriminal introduces fake data into a DNS resolver’s cache. These attacks develop a weakness in the DNS system’s software that causes the DNS servers to send traffic for a particular domain to the criminal’s computer instead of the valid owner of the domain.
Man-in-the-Middle attack.
They also use irregular devices, such as unsecured Wi-Fi and access points. If the criminal installs unsecured Wi-Fi near a public place, unsuspecting people may sign in to these devices, and the packet sniffer copies their personal information.
Packet forgery or packet injection interferes with established network communication by constructing packets to become visible just as they are part of communication. This allows a criminal to interrupt or catch real packets. With this process, a criminal can hijack an authorized connection or deny an authorized person the ability to use assured network services. This is a man-in-the-middle attack.