Common network attacks

100 XP
  • 2 minutes

As networks expand and change to meet our ever-growing needs, they become more susceptible to attacks. Providing a strong network security perimeter is essential to protect your data and resources. Cybercriminals will exploit any weakness to try to break into your network. The ways in which networks can be attacked are too numerous to cover here. Let's consider the more common ones:

  • Adversary-in-The-Middle (AiTM) or eavesdropping attack – this type of attack can occur when cybercriminals compromise or emulate routes in the network, allowing them to intercept the packets of information. Think of this as a form of wiretapping. This allows attackers to not just steal data but also compromise its integrity.
  • Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack – the objective of a DDoS attack is to compromise the availability of the targeted network or service. Attackers do this by bombarding the targeted network or service with millions of simultaneous requests, from sources that are distributed across the network, overwhelming it and causing it to crash.

In this short video, you'll see a simplified simulation of how each of these attacks work.

For the adversary-in-the-middle attack, to keep it simple, we chose to only use one route. With the DDoS attack, hundreds of thousands, or even tens of millions, of computers are used. Again, for simplicity, we've only shown a handful.

Lateral movement

Most cybercriminals look to exploit your network to gain data they can sell and to cause maximum disruption. However, with a lateral movement attack, the primary focus isn't to smash and grab, but to break in undetected. The aim of a lateral movement attack by cybercriminals is to try to gain advantage of, or extend their presence in your network, with the primary goal of finding sensitive and valuable information. Some cybercriminals, having successfully infiltrated your network to the top level using lateral movement, may choose to sell those access credentials to the highest bidder.

Good threat detection and protection software will allow you to spot abnormal behavior on your network, flag it, and even mitigate the cyberattack.

Next unit: Zero Trust and the network

Previous Next