Which of the following attack is MOSTLY performed by an attacker to steal the identity information of a user such as credit card number, passwords, etc?
Correct Answer: C
Explanation/Reference:
Harming is a cyber attack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another, bogus site. Harming can be conducted either by changing the hosts file on a victim's computer or by exploitation of a vulnerability in DNS server software. DNS servers are computers responsible for resolving Internet names into their real IP addresses. Compromised DNS servers are sometimes referred to as "poisoned". Harming requires unprotected access to target a computer, such as altering a customer's home computer, rather than a corporate business server.
The term "phrasing" is a neologism based on the words "farming" and "phishing". Phishing is a type of social-engineering attack to obtain access credentials, such as user names and passwords. In recent years, both phrasing and phishing have been used to gain information for online identity theft. Phrasing has become of major concern to businesses hosting ecommerce and online banking websites.
Sophisticated measures known as anti-harming are required to protect against this serious threat. Antivirus software and spyware removal software cannot protect against harming.
For your exam you should know the information below:
Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and sometimes, indirectly, money) by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, banks, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure unsuspecting public. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing or instant messaging, and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users, and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.
Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.
Spear phishing - Phishing attempts directed at specific individuals or companies have been termed spear phishing. Attackers may gather personal information about their target to increase their probability of success.
Link manipulation
Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of sub domains are common tricks used by phishes. In the following example URL, http:// www.yourbank.example.com/, it appears as though the URL will take you to the example section of the your bank website; actually this URL points to the "your bank" (i.e. phishing) section of the example website. Another common trick is to make the displayed text for a link (the text between the are tags) suggest a reliable destination, when the link actually goes to the phishes' site. The following example link, //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genuine, appears to direct the user to an article entitled "Genuine"; clicking on it will in fact take the user to the article entitled "Deception". In the lower left hand corner of most browsers users can preview and verify where the link is going to take them. Hovering your cursor over the link for a couple of seconds may do a similar thing, but this can still be set by the phishes through the HTML tooltip tag.
Website forgery
Once a victim visits the phishing website, the deception is not over. Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of a legitimate URL over the address bar, or by closing the original bar and opening up a new one with the legitimate URL.
An attacker can even use flaws in a trusted website's own scripts against the victim. These types of attacks (known as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, making it very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge.
The following answers are incorrect:
Smurf Attack - Occurs when mix-configured network device allow packet to be sent to all hosts on a particular network via the broadcast address of the network Traffic analysis - is the process of intercepting and examining messages in order to deduce information from patterns in communication. It can be performed even when the messages are encrypted and cannot be decrypted. In general, the greater the number of messages observed, or even intercepted and stored, the more can be inferred from the traffic. Traffic analysis can be performed in the context of military intelligence, counter-intelligence, or pattern-of-life analysis, and is a concern in computer security.
Interrupt attack- Interrupt attack occurs when a malicious action is performed by invoking the operating system to execute a particular system call.
Following reference(s) were/was used to create this question:
CISA review manual 2014 Page number 323
Official ISC2 guide to CISSP CBK 3rd Edition Page number326
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharming
