Which of the following attack could be avoided by creating more security awareness in the organization and
provide adequate security knowledge to all employees?
Correct Answer: C
Section: Protection of Information Assets
Explanation/Reference:
Phishing techniques include social engineering, link manipulation, spear phishing, whaling, dishing, or web
site forgery techniques.
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 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 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 number 493
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing
