We all know what hackers want; our precious data and credentials. Most of the time they are motivated by both of these as uncovering a wealth of data can help them to cash in or even cause damage just to entertain themselves. This page will focus primarily on common hacking techniques in 2022 that are being exploited by hackers! Some new techniques have also been explored that will help you study this topic further.
Compromised data can cost a user a lot.
According to research done by IBM:
“Cost of a Data Breach was a global average total of $3.86 Million in 2020”
Now, recovery costs and reputational repercussions can put you out of business if performed by a well-executed hacker. Therefore, this year you need to educate all your employees about the common hacking techniques that can cause damage to your organization.
The 5 Most Common Hacking Techniques (New)
Devices that inject Malware
Cybercriminals can use hardware in order to sneak malware onto your system. Have you heard about the Infected USB Stick? If not then don’t worry, these provide them remote access to your device as soon as it is plugged in.
All it takes is for one user to give a malware-ridden USB stick, and then by plugging in simply into your system, you get infected. The clever ones are now using cords for this purpose such as USB cords and mouse cords, therefore, it is crucial to always think twice before plugging anything into your work or personal device which has access to data related to your work.
Note: Just educate your employees about this and ask them to re-thing before plugging in an unknown cable or drive.
Social Engineering + Phishing – The Most Feared
This is used to get personal information by impersonating a trusted source. Many of such bait come in the form of phishing emails, as a clever one sends you a message similar to someone that you may know, in which asks you to do something like wire them money or click or download an infected attachment to see more.
“The top malicious email attachment types are .doc and .dot which make up 37%, the next highest is .exe at 19.5%, according to Symatec’s Internet Security”
Threat Reports, thus you need to be cautious while opening such kinds of attachments as they are able to infect your device with malware and provide control to bad actors to have control on your data.
Note: Educate workers to never give provide private business information over mail and to think twice before opening any attachments and also teach them how to avoid email scams.
Password brute-forcing – Is it still working?
Now security thefts are able to get hold of your credentials by a common practice which is known as keylogging. Through a social engineering attack, the user is accidentally able to get a hold on software that is able to record their keystrokes, saving their usernames and passwords as they type in.
This and some other form of spyware are actually malware which is able to track down your activity unless and until a bad actor has what they require, in spite of this they can also deploy this on the user machine if they are in your environment and capture user credentials through keylogging as well.
Now, there are password-cracking programs as well which are able to run letter and character combinations, password guessing in case of minutes and even settings. Like a 5 character password can have about 100 different combinations, as well as a savvy password cracker, can run via them in all seconds.
Some Advice: Use a password management tool that is used to house your company credentials securely. Such tools are often used to auto-generate lengthy, diverse character passwords which is quite difficult to Bruteforce guess, and auto-fill for employees to easily access their tools. Moreover, you can also consider looking for encryption and multi-factor authentication ways in order to shield data behind different levels of protection.
0-Day Vulnerabilities and Patches – Advanced and complex
Now as such landscapes are advancing, the security tools are becoming outdated, these require frequent updates in order to protect from all the new threats. However, there are some users who actually ignore the update notifications or security patches leaving themselves vulnerable.
Now, keep in mind that not only the anti-virus software requires this, but 18% of all the network-level vulnerabilities are also caused due to unpatched apps – Apache, Cisco, Microsoft, WordPress, BSD, PHP and many others according to EdgeScan’s Vulnerability statistics report. Your apps require constant attention as well in order to keep these people from exploiting holes in your security.
Note: You need to be sure that all your antivirus and apps are updated on a routine basis as these become available.
Hijacking Secure Sessions and Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
Whenever you are using you’re the internet your system has much small back and forth transactions with servers around the globe letting them know who you are and requesting certain sites or services, if everything goes good in return then the webserver should respond to your request by providing the information you are accessing. This happens either you are browsing or logging into a site with your credentials.
The session between your system and the remote web server is provided a special session ID which shall stay private between the two parties; however, an attacker is able to hijack the session by capturing session ID and posing as the system makes a request, allowing them to log in as an unsuspecting user and get access to un-authorized information there on the server.
There are various methods that an attacker can use in order to steal this like a cross-site scripting attack that is used to do this.
He is also able to opt to do infect the session to add themselves between requesting system and a remote server, pretending to be some other party in this. Now, this allows them to intercept information in both directions which are known as the man-in-the-Middle attack.
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Resources to get you started and learn some hacking methods
- How DDoS Attacks are Performed.
- How WPA2 WiFi Passwords can be hacked.
- Email Account Hacking (Ultimate Guide).
- Learn how to use Kali Linux (Beginner Friendly).
- Top Hacking Books To Study.
Which Web Hacking Techniques do you know about?
So these were the most common and new hacking techniques out there in the wild, I am sure the methods shared above have amazed you. You can also find more information in books but they might not be as recent as the ones researched above. Please do let me know if the study above was of any use for you and if it helped, any feedback is much appreciated.
I agree with 0-Day attacks, these are so common and dangerous.
I agree with 0-Day attacks, these are so common and dangerous.