Cyber Security

Hello everyone! Before today’s article, imagine the situation that you would face if you suddenly lost your mobile phone. Honestly for a lot of people who already have a mobile phone, can not even imagine their life without it. So why this happen? It’s because it holds lots of our valuable data. That data ranging from our name to even our financial data. So it’s not just about a physical device. It’s about security of our data. Now you can imagine how important security of our data in today’s world. This is a whole subject. That’s what we called cyber security.

What is cyber security?

Cyber security is the concept of protecting systems, networks, and programs from attack, damage, or unauthorized access. Cyber security may also be referred to as information technology security.

CIA Triad

Confidentiality, integrity and availability, also known as the CIA triad, is a model designed to guide policies for information security within an organization. Those are the main three facts we focus on when we want to ensure the security of data. We can elaborate each term as follows,

1. Confidentiality — Prevent unauthorized disclosure of system and information.
2. Integrity — Prevent unauthorized modification of system and information.
3. Availability — Prevent disruptions of service and productivity.

Access Control

Access control is the process of identifying a subject and determine their level of accessing to an object. In here subject means active entities like users, programs and processes. Object means passive entities like files, programs and hardware.

There are 3 types of access control.

1. Physical — Prevent physical unauthorized accesses
2. Logical — Prevent unauthorized electronic accesses
3. Administrative — Control access control procedures and policies

Modern access control systems consist of all above 3 aspects.

Logical access control

The most crucial aspect in access control is logical access control which prevent unauthorized electronic (virtual) accesses. This is the aspect that we used to enforce an access control policy over subject. There are 4 steps in logical access control.

1. Identification — Identifying the subject that ask permission to access to an object.
2. Authentication — Process of proving identity of the subject to the system that the subject trying to access.
3. Authorization — Determine subject’s access permission within the system. Authorization policies start after the authentication process completes.
4. Accountability — Ability to track by recoding user, system and application activities. Subject must be uniquely identified and their action must be recorded.

Password hacking

Since almost every digital device user maintain a password it would be valuable to know about some password hacking techniques. When the password is some common dictionary word or your obvious personal information it won’t take much time for an attacker to hack your system.

Also when the user of target system is easily persuasive and has lack of knowledge about security it would become clear advantage for the attacker.

1. Brute force attack — Try every possible character combinations to obtain the password.
2. Dictionary attack — Use a defined dictionary to guess your password.
3. Phishing — Fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data, such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, or other sensitive details by impersonating oneself as a trustworthy entity in a digital communication.
4. Social engineering — Uses psychological manipulation to trick users into making security mistakes or giving away sensitive information
5. Guessing — When the attacker know the user’s background well they can guess the password.
6. Shoulder surfing — Direct observation of sensitive data by simply looking over someone’s shoulder using social engineering techniques.

How to choose a strong password?

Now since we know about password hacking attacks let’s understand how to select a strong password which will reinforce the security of our system. Here are few tips.

1. Don’t use obvious dictionary word or combination of dictionary words.
2. Password should be long enough. It’s better at least your password contain 12 characters.
3. Try to include combination of capital letters, simple letters, symbols and numbers.
4. Don’t use your obvious personal details such as your name or your date of birth.

There is another crucial fact that need to mention. Always be careful when you publish your personal details in social media platforms. When you post too much information about yourself it will be very helpful for an intruder to initiate an attack.

Intruder behavior

It is very helpful to prevent attack if we know the behavior of these kind of intruders. So who is an intruder?

An intruder is someone who penetrates system’s access control to gain unauthorized access to a target system. They are motivated by many reasons like profit, challenge, information gathering or protest. When they initiating an attack there are several steps they follow. We called this behavior as cyber attack cycle.

An intruder may spend several days, weeks and even months for an serious attack. There are seven steps in an serious attack.

1. Reconnaissance — The whole point in this stage is to identify the target. They are trying to understand the circumstances around the target, vulnerable points and all other necessary details they want.

2. Initial program — In this stage they will create necessary ‘weapons’ against to the target. That might be web page, malicious program or emails.

3. Delivery — Initiate the attack. Emails will be sent. Webpages would be posted. malicious programs would be initiated or send to the system by attaching to relevant resources.

4. Exploitation — Attackers penetrate to the system through the most vulnerable port using the information they gathered from previous stage.

5. Installation — In this stage the attacker makes sure that they can access to the network in the future. They will create a persistent backdoor to access to the system again.

6. Command and control — The attacker make sure that they can access, control and command the entire computer network.

7. Action on objective — The attacker achieve their objective. Damage the target. It could be corruption of information, Stealing information or prevent providing service something else.

Intrusion detection is a process of monitoring activities to identify the potential attacks. In usual this process included the data of previously recognized attacks and machine learning process. But if the attack is zero-day attack that cannot be identify through this process.

It is accurate to state that in today’s world data is one of most crucial fact. Some sensitive data can even affect to the national security of a whole state. Therefore security of that data becomes essential part of every country, organization and even for individuals. Every individual must have a good idea about security of their data. Therefore your knowledge about cyber security would be never wasted. Hope this article helps you to broaden your knowledge.

Thank you!

Written by,

R.A.W. Lalendra

Bsc(hons) Software Engineering undergraduate

University of Kelaniya Sri Lanka.