Hacktivism

Hacktivism is a portmanteau of hacking and activism, which was coined in the US by the hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow in the 1990s. It is the subversive use of computers and computer networks to promote a political agenda or a social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to the free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve, the ability to monitor, detect, and defend against cyberattacks has now become more arduous than ever.

Hacktivists operate within the fabric of cyberspace, struggling over what is technologically possible in virtual lives, and reaches out of cyberspace utilising virtual powers to mould offline life. Social movements and popular protest are integral parts of twenty-first-century societies. Hacktivism is activism gone electronic.

Cyberattacks by hacktivists are at an all-time high. With the use of social media, hacktivists can now spread the word and recruit across the globe with a single tweet or a Facebook post to carry out their agenda driven attack.

Hacktivists who are motivated by nationalism or patriotism tend to target government websites within the state offending their patriotic sentiments and will be referred to as ‘hacktriots’—patriotic hackers.
Hacktivism

Direct Attack hacking

Hacker is a term that applies to anyone who writes computer program code. Cracker is a term that applies to people who use their skills to attempt to access other computer without permission.

There are even programs shared across the internet, allowing people with less skill to mount an attack. Broadly, two types of attacks can be considered: indirect attack and direct attack. A direct attack is a hacker using a personal computer to break into syst

Direct attacks are performed at the sensor level outside the digital limits of the system and therefore, no digital protection mechanism can be used against it.

Direct attacks originate from the threat itself. It would take the form of hacking into a computer system and rewriting or stealing information. This would have a great impact on organizations offering on-line services, since these on-line services could be damaged, modified or destroyed.

Neither problem is that of the organization were not able to determine where the security risk lies, the direct attacks would be re-occurring.

In a direct attack an imposter can either change his biometric characteristics in order to evade identification or claim an authorized user’s identity by simply posing himself or by presenting a falsified biometric trait of that user.

The impact of the attacks would be to publicize the hackers and destroy the credibility of the organization offering the on-line services especially to current and future customers.
Direct Attack hacking

Cross-site scripting

The Cross Site scripting is one of the problems that have plagued a lot of websites. Cross site scripting or XSS, is a term for a category of security issues in which an attacker injects HTML tags or scripts into a target website.

Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities date back to 1996 during the early days of the World Wide Web. A time when e-commerce began to take off, the bubble days of Netscape, Yahoo and the obnoxious blink tag.

In December 1999, David Ross was working in security response for Internet Explorer at Microsoft. He was inspired by the work of Georgi Guninsky who was at the time finding flaws in Internet Explorers security model.

David demonstrated that web content could expose ‘Script Injection’ effectively by -passing the same security guarantees by passed by Georgi’s Internet Explorer code flaws, but where the fault seemed to exist on the server side instead of the client side Internet Explorer code.

Cross site scripting can be performed by passing scripts in form of:
*TextBox
*Cookies
*Query Strings
*Web application variable
*Session variables

A web page is vulnerable to cross site scripting if it dynamically generates document content and bases that content on user submitted date without first ‘sanitizing’ that data by removing any embedded HTML tags from it.
Cross-site scripting

Denial of Service Attack

A denial of service attack (DoS) is considered to take place only when access to a computer or network resource is intentionally blocked as a result of malicious action taken by another user.

These attacks do not necessarily damage data directly or permanently (although they could), but they intentionally compromise the availability of the resources.

The purpose of a denial of service attack is to render a network inaccessible by generating a type or amount of network traffic that will crash the servers, overwhelm the routers, or otherwise prevent the networks devices from functioning properly. These forms of attacks can include e-mail bomb attacks, sending thousands of e-mails to a particular computer system until that system crash, the software required to carry out denial of service attacks in widely available on the internet.

Another commonly used denial of service attack is the Ping O’ Death. The Ping O’ Death can crash or reboot a computer by sending a ‘ping’ message of greater than 65,536 bytes the default size is 64 bytes. Router updates have nearly eliminated these problems.

Denial of service attacks could be very effective against an Internet based company, since they rely on on-line connectivity. These sorts of attacks could easily disrupt electronic commerce on-line mechanisms.

Meanwhile the distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is a denial of service attack, in which a multitude of attackers performs denial of service attacks in a coordinated manner to one or more targets. DDoS attacks are a subset of denial of service attacks and there must be more than one source of attacking and also must be coordination between the attackers.
Denial of Service Attack

What is cyber terrorism?

The term cyber terrorism was coined in 1996 by combining the terms cyberspace and terrorism. The term has become widely accepted after being embraced by the United States Armed Forces.

Cyber terrorism hinges on the widespread use of computers by individuals, private industry and corporations, the military and the government and it agency.

It differs from traditional military tactics in one particular and very important way: civilians are often targeted. Civilians are seen as being active participants in and supporters of the power structure and social system that the terrorists are against.

The awareness of security has since September 11 events increased in many ways - increased concerned over physical sites, increased concerns of securing networked infrastructure and changes in corporate attitude from being confident about their organization’s security and delaying spending on security, to seeing IT security as an essential capital investment.

It will be web defacements, semantic attacks, domain name server (DNS) attacks, distributed denial service (DDoS) attacks, routing systems and infrastructure attacks. These are hidden weak spots attackers and cyber criminals use to get our information assents. What was secure yesterday simply does not hold up today.

Cyber terrorism means premeditated, politically motivated attacks by sub national groups or clandestine agents or individual against information and computer systems, computer programs and data that result in violence against non-combatant targets. In addition to direct financial loss, the loss of reputation and trust cause real long term damage.

Cyber terrorist attack could lead to death or bodily injury, through explosions, plane crashes, water contamination, or severe economic loss’.

Society vital services and critical infrastructure: communications, finance, transportation, and utilities such as electricity, oil, gas and water rely on computer and computer networked.

If these networked are damaged the nation will be disrupt. Governments as well as business that own and operate banks, utility infrastructure, transportation systems, telecommunications networks and other critical systems, must be prepared for the possibility of a destructive attack in cyberspace.
What is cyber terrorism?

What is cyber theft?

Cyber theft can be defined as the use of computer networks for criminal profits, Infringement of copyright, identity theft and internet securities fraud are example of cyber theft.

Many computer crimes involve the theft of money or goods or intellectual property. In the majority of cases, they are “inside jobs” that involve unauthorized network entry and fraudulent alternation of computer databases to cover the tracks of the employees involved.

This category includes cyber intrusion, but is also sometimes used to refer to any criminal theft, where a computer system or the internet is used as a means of perpetrating the crime.

One of the examples was involve the use of internet, such as the widely publicized theft of $11 million from Citibank in late 1994, Russian hacker Vladimir Levin and his accomplices in St. Petersburg used the Internet to electronically break into Citibank’s mainframe systems in New York.

They then succeed in transferring the funds from several Citibank accounts to their own account at banks in Finland, Israel, and California.

The new computer based technology allows criminals to operate in a more efficient and effective manner.

Cyber thieves now have the luxury of remaining anonymous, living in any part of the planet, conducting their business during the day, working the evening, working alone or in a group, and at the same time reaching a much wider number of potential victims than ever before.

In most case, the scope of such financial losses is much larger than the incidents reported. Most companies don’t reveal that they have been targets or victims of computer crimes.
What is cyber theft?

What is computer hacker?

In the computer security context, a hacker is a person who attempts to breach the security of computer system by access from a remote point, especially by guessing or otherwise obtaining a password.

The person had an instinctive knowledge enabling him or her to develop software apparently by trial and error.

The broadest term of hacker would be a computer expert who is capable of clever or novel solution to computer problems.

Hacking, in computerese, is the obsessive use of computers, or the unauthorized access and use of networked computer system. Illegal hackers (also called crackers) frequently assault the internet and other networks to steal or damage data and programs.

Although many person in the computer industry continue to use the term ‘hacker’ to pick out programmers of distinction, the term ‘hacker’ is now used by most person only to pick out persons who intrude upon systems and machines belonging to other people without any meaningful authorization.

Hackers can monitor E-mail, Web server access, or file transfer to extract passwords or steal network files, or to plant data that will cause a system to welcome intruders.

A hacker may also use remote services that allow one computer on a network to execute programs on another computer to gain privileged access within network.

Hackers, crackers and computer criminals have a growing palate of tactics and technologies that can used to achieve their purpose.

This include harvesting passwords from unsuspecting user, stepping stones that conceal the ultimate source of an intrusion and stolen storage space to serve as caches for among other things, attack programs, password files or stolen card credit numbers.

The good and bad hackers have similar personalities. What separate them is their ethics.
What is computer hacker?

How does ‘Denial of Service’ attack works?

A denial of service attack is an act of sabotage that attempts to flood a network server or Web server with so many requests for action until it crashes simply cannot handle legitimate requests any longer, causing legitimates users to be denied service.

The attack overwhelms the system’s ability to process web traffic and eventually crashes it.

Denial-of-service attacks can compromise the computers in a network. They can disorganize an organization’s functioning, depending on the nature of the attack.

University security experts were the first to discover the threat of denial of service attacks hiding in the university computer systems. For example, David Dittrich of the University of Washington discovered denial of service program files stored on the university servers’ months before the first widely publicized attacks on E-ecommerce web sites.

Denial of service attacks can be very costly in terms of business lost such as when an e-commerce site is shut down.

The attack, which would typically come from several compromised machine at once, would consumed network bandwidth and use up processing unit cycles on the target machine.

The goal is to stop hosts or networks for communicating in the network or to disrupt network traffic.

The concern would be what is called distributed denial of service attack where take a lot of compromised end systems and flood a server with the intent of making many request or delivering so much traffic to it that it falls off the network.

One of the reasons it takes so long to stop a denial-of-service attack is the hacker sends the bogus traffic using fake IP addresses.
How does ‘Denial of Service’ attack works?

Computer Hacking

In the 1960s, hackers were perceived as skilled computer wizards who curiosity would lead to technological advancement. At that time the term ‘hacker’ was used to describe an individual working with computers who was technically gifted.

Today , a hacker is a person who attempts to breach the security of a computer system by access from the remote point.

Although the term hacker still has both positive and negative connotation, hacking does not. The technical means of hacking have become ever more sophisticated. It refers to the trespassing or accessing of a website without authorization.

Hacking is often defined in terms of individuals who seek to gain ‘unauthorized access’ to computer systems, and the currently broadly accepted view of a hacker is someone who uses specialized knowledge of computer systems to obtain illegal access to them.

Unauthorized entry can led to legal consequences, particularly if a hacker is deliberately violating the website’s right to privacy.

Hacking provides one of the most widely analyzed and debated forms of cybercriminal activity, and serves as an intense focus for pubic concerns about the threat that such activity poses to society.

The use of computer for the purpose of material gain or mischief is a crime and can result in incarceration. 

People who use the internet for illegal purpose have been called ‘cracker’ within the hacker community in order to distinguish them from people who are simply demonstrated their knowledge.
Computer Hacking