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The field is significant due to the expanded reliance on computer systems, the Internet, and wireless network standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It is also significant due to the growth of smart devices, including smartphones, televisions, and the various devices that constitute the Internet of Things (IoT). Cybersecurity is one of the most significant challenges of the contemporary world, due to both the complexity of information systems and the societies they support. Security is of especially high importance for systems that govern large-scale systems with far-reaching physical effects, such as power distribution, elections, and finance.
While most aspects of computer security involve digital measures such as electronic passwords and encryption, physical security measures such as metal locks are still used to prevent unauthorized tampering.
A vulnerability refers to a flaw in the structure, execution, functioning, or internal oversight of a computer or system that compromises its security. Most of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered are documented in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.
An exploitable vulnerability is one for which at least one working attack or exploit exists. Vulnerabilities can be researched, reverse-engineered, hunted, or exploited using automated tools or customized scripts.
Various people or parties are vulnerable to cyber attacks; however, different groups are likely to experience different types of attacks more than others.
Normal internet users are most likely to be affected by untargeted cyberattacks. These are where attackers indiscriminately target as many devices, services, or users as possible. They do this using techniques that take advantage of the openness of the Internet. These strategies mostly include phishing, ransomware, waterholing, and scanning.
To secure a computer system, it is important to understand the attacks that can be made against it, and these threats can typically be classified into one of the following categories:
A backdoor in a computer system, a cryptosystem, or an algorithm is any secret method of bypassing normal authentication or security controls. These weaknesses may exist for many reasons, including original design or poor configuration. Due to the nature of backdoors, they are of greater concern to companies and databases as opposed to individuals.
Backdoors may be added by an authorized party to allow some legitimate access or by an attacker for malicious reasons. Criminals often use malware to install backdoors, giving them remote administrative access to a system. Once they have access, cybercriminals can "modify files, steal personal information, install unwanted software, and even take control of the entire computer."
Backdoors can be very hard to detect and are usually discovered by someone who has access to the application source code or intimate knowledge of the operating system of the computer.
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS) are designed to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users. Attackers can deny service to individual victims, such as by deliberately entering a wrong password enough consecutive times to cause the victim's account to be locked, or they may overload the capabilities of a machine or network and block all users at once. While a network attack from a single IP address can be blocked by adding a new firewall rule, many forms of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are possible, where the attack comes from a large number of points. In this case, defending against these attacks is much more difficult. Such attacks can originate from the zombie computers of a botnet or from a range of other possible techniques, including distributed reflective denial-of-service (DRDoS), where innocent systems are fooled into sending traffic to the victim.
With such attacks, the amplification factor makes the attack easier for the attacker because they have to use little bandwidth themselves. To understand why attackers may carry out these attacks, see the 'attacker motivation' section.
A direct-access attack is when an unauthorized user (an attacker) gains physical access to a computer, most likely to directly copy data from it or steal information. Attackers may also compromise security by making operating system modifications, installing software worms, keyloggers, covert listening devices, or using wireless microphones. Even when the system is protected by standard security measures, these may be bypassed by booting another operating system or tool from a CD-ROM or other bootable media. Disk encryption and the Trusted Platform Module standard are designed to prevent these attacks.
Direct service attackers are related in concept to direct memory attacks which allow an attacker to gain direct access to a computer's memory. The attacks "take advantage of a feature of modern computers that allows certain devices, such as external hard drives, graphics cards, or network cards, to access the computer's memory directly."
Eavesdropping is the act of surreptitiously listening to a private computer conversation (communication), usually between hosts on a network. It typically occurs when a user connects to a network where traffic is not secured or encrypted and sends sensitive business data to a colleague, which, when listened to by an attacker, could be exploited. Data transmitted across an "open network" allows an attacker to exploit a vulnerability and intercept it via various methods.
Unlike malware, direct-access attacks, or other forms of cyber attacks, eavesdropping attacks are unlikely to negatively affect the performance of networks or devices, making them difficult to notice. In fact, "the attacker does not need to have any ongoing connection to the software at all. The attacker can insert the software onto a compromised device, perhaps by direct insertion or perhaps by a virus or other malware, and then come back sometime later to retrieve any data that is found or trigger the software to send the data at some determined time."
Using a virtual private network (VPN), which encrypts data between two points, is one of the most common forms of protection against eavesdropping. Using the best form of encryption possible for wireless networks is best practice, as well as using HTTPS instead of an unencrypted HTTP.
Programs such as Carnivore and NarusInSight have been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and NSA to eavesdrop on the systems of internet service providers. Even machines that operate as a closed system (i.e., with no contact with the outside world) can be eavesdropped upon by monitoring the faint electromagnetic transmissions generated by the hardware. TEMPEST is a specification by the NSA referring to these attacks.
Malicious software (malware) is any software code or computer program "intentionally written to harm a computer system or its users." Once present on a computer, it can leak sensitive details such as personal information, business information, and passwords, can give control of the system to the attacker, and can corrupt or delete data permanently. Another type of malware is ransomware, which is when "malware installs itself onto a victim's machine, encrypts their files, and then turns around and demands a ransom (usually in Bitcoin) to return that data to the user."
Types of Malware include some of the following;
Man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM) involve a malicious attacker trying to intercept, surveil, or modify communications between two parties by spoofing one or both party's identities and injecting themselves in between. Types of MITM attacks include:
Surfacing in 2017, a new class of multi-vector, polymorphic cyber threats combine several types of attacks and change form to avoid cybersecurity controls as they spread.
Multi-vector polymorphic attacks, as the name describes, are both multi-vectored and polymorphic. Firstly, they are a singular attack that involves multiple methods of attack. In this sense, they are “multi-vectored (i.e. the attack can use multiple means of propagation such as via the Web, email, and applications." However, they are also multi-staged, meaning that “they can infiltrate networks and move laterally inside the network.” The attacks can be polymorphic, meaning that the cyberattacks used such as viruses, worms, or trojans “constantly change (“morph”) making it nearly impossible to detect them using signature-based defenses".
Phishing is the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details directly from users by deceiving the users. Phishing is typically carried out by email spoofing, instant messaging, text messaging, or a phone call. They often direct users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. The fake website often asks for personal information, such as login details and passwords. This information can then be used to gain access to the individual's real account on the real website.
Preying on a victim's trust, phishing can be classified as a form of social engineering. Attackers can use creative ways to gain access to real accounts. A common scam is for attackers to send fake electronic invoices to individuals showing that they recently purchased music, apps, or others, and instructing them to click on a link if the purchases were not authorized. A more strategic type of phishing is spear-phishing which leverages personal or organization-specific details to make the attacker appear like a trusted source. Spear-phishing attacks target specific individuals, rather than the broad net cast by phishing attempts.
Privilege escalation describes a situation where an attacker with some level of restricted access can, without authorization, elevate their privileges or access level. For example, a standard computer user may be able to exploit a vulnerability in the system to gain access to restricted data; or even become root and have full unrestricted access to a system. The severity of attacks can range from attacks simply sending an unsolicited email to a ransomware attack on large amounts of data. Privilege escalation usually starts with social engineering techniques, often phishing.
Privilege escalation can be separated into two strategies, horizontal and vertical privilege escalation:
Any computational system affects its environment in some form. This effect it has on its environment can range from electromagnetic radiation to residual effects on RAM cells which as a consequence make a Cold boot attack possible, to hardware implementation faults that allow for access and or guessing of other values that normally should be inaccessible. In Side-channel attack scenarios, the attacker would gather such information about a system or network to guess its internal state and as a result access the information which is assumed by the victim to be secure.
Social engineering, in the context of computer security, aims to convince a user to disclose secrets such as passwords, card numbers, etc., or grant physical access by, for example, impersonating a senior executive, bank, contractor, or customer. This generally involves exploiting people's trust and relying on their cognitive biases. A common scam involves emails sent to accounting and finance department personnel, impersonating their CEO and urgently requesting some action. One of the main techniques of social engineering is phishing attacks.
In early 2016, the FBI reported that such business email compromise (BEC) scams had cost US businesses more than $2 billion in about two years.
In May 2016, the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team was the victim of this type of cyber scam with a perpetrator impersonating the team's president Peter Feigin, resulting in the handover of all the team's employees' 2015 W-2 tax forms.
Spoofing is an act of pretending to be a valid entity through the falsification of data (such as an IP address or username), to gain access to information or resources that one is otherwise unauthorized to obtain. Spoofing is closely related to phishing. There are several types of spoofing, including:
In 2018, the cybersecurity firm Trellix published research on the life-threatening risk of spoofing in the healthcare industry.
HTML smuggling allows an attacker to "smuggle" a malicious code inside a particular HTML or web page. HTML files can carry payloads concealed as benign, inert data to defeat content filters. These payloads can be reconstructed on the other side of the filter.
When a target user opens the HTML, the malicious code is activated; the web browser then "decodes" the script, which then unleashes the malware onto the target's device.
In computer security, a countermeasure is an action, device, procedure, or technique that reduces a threat, a vulnerability, or an attack by eliminating or preventing it, by minimizing the harm it can cause, or by discovering and reporting it so that corrective action can be taken. Some of the countermeasures are listed in the following sections;
Security by design, or secure by design, means that the software has been designed from the ground up to be secure. In this case, security is considered a main feature. The UK government's National Cyber Security Center separates secure cyber design principles into 5 sections;
These design principles of security by design can include some of the following techniques;
Security architecture can be defined as the "practice of designing computer systems to achieve security goals". These goals overlap with the principles of "security by design" explored above, including to "make an initial compromise of the system difficult", and to "limit the impact of any compromise". In practice, the role of a security architect would be to ensure the structure of a system reinforces the security of the system, and that new changes are safe and meet the security requirements of the organization.
A state of computer security is the conceptual ideal, attained by the use of three processes: threat prevention, detection, and response. These processes are based on various policies and system components, which include the following:
Today, cybersecurity consists mainly of preventive measures, like firewalls or an exit procedure. A firewall can be defined as a way of filtering network data between a host or a network and another network, such as the Internet. They can be implemented as software running on the machine, hooking into the network stack (or, in the case of most UNIX-based operating systems such as Linux, built into the operating system kernel) to provide real-time filtering and blocking. Another implementation is a so-called physical firewall, which consists of a separate machine filtering network traffic. Firewalls are common among machines that are permanently connected to the internet.
Some organizations are turning to big data platforms, such as Apache Hadoop, to extend data accessibility and machine learning to detect advanced persistent threats.
To ensure adequate security, the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of a network, better known as the CIA triad, must be protected and is considered the foundation of information security. To achieve those objectives, administrative, physical, and technical security measures should be employed. The amount of security afforded to an asset can only be determined when its value is known.
Vulnerability management is the cycle of identifying, fixing, or mitigating vulnerabilities, especially in software and firmware. Vulnerability management is integral to computer security and network security.
Vulnerabilities can be discovered with a vulnerability scanner, which analyzes a computer system in search of known vulnerabilities, such as open ports, insecure software configuration, and susceptibility to malware. For these tools to be effective, they must be kept up to date with every new update the vendor releases. Typically, these updates will scan for the new vulnerabilities that were introduced recently. Beyond vulnerability scanning, many organizations contract outside security auditors to run regular penetration tests against their systems to identify vulnerabilities. In some sectors, this is a contractual requirement.
The act of accessing and reducing vulnerabilities to cyber attacks is commonly referred to as information technology security assessments. They aim to assess systems for risk and to predict and test for their vulnerabilities. While formal verification of the correctness of computer systems is possible, it is not yet common. Operating systems formally verified include seL4, and SYSGO's PikeOS - but these make up a very small percentage of the market.
It is possible to reduce an attacker's chances by keeping systems up to date with security patches and updates and/or hiring people with security expertise. Large companies with significant threats can hire Security Operations Center (SOC) Analysts. These are specialists in cyber defenses, with their roles ranging from conducting threat analysis to investigating reports of any new issues and preparing and testing disaster recovery plans.
Whilst no measures can completely guarantee the prevention of an attack, these measures can help mitigate the damage of possible attacks. The effects of data loss or damage can also be reduced by careful backing up and insurance.
Outside of formal assessments, there are various methods of reducing vulnerabilities. Two-factor authentication is a method for mitigating unauthorized access to a system or sensitive information. It requires something you know; a password or PIN, and something you have; a card, dongle, cellphone, or another piece of hardware. This increases security as an unauthorized person needs both of these to gain access.
Hardware-based or assisted computer security also offers an alternative to software-only computer security. Using devices and methods such as dongles, trusted platform modules, intrusion-aware cases, drive locks, disabling USB ports, and mobile-enabled access may be considered more secure due to the physical access (or sophisticated backdoor access) required to be compromised. Each of these is covered in more detail below;
One use of the term computer security refers to technology that is used to implement secure operating systems. Using secure operating systems is a good way of ensuring computer security. These are systems that have achieved certification from an external security-auditing organization, the most popular evaluations are Common Criteria (CC).
In software engineering, secure coding aims to guard against the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. It is also possible to create software designed from the ground up to be secure. Such systems are secure by design. Beyond this, formal verification aims to prove the correctness of the algorithms underlying a system; important for cryptographic protocols for example.
Within computer systems, two of the main security models capable of enforcing privilege separation are access control lists (ACLs) and role-based access controls (RBAC).
An access control list (ACL), concerning a computer file system, is a list of permissions associated with an object. An ACL specifies which users or system processes are granted access to objects, as well as what operations are allowed on given objects.
Role-based access control is an approach to restricting system access to authorized users, used by the majority of enterprises with more than 500 employees, and can implement mandatory access control (MAC) or Discretionary Access Control (DAC).
A further approach, capability-based security has been mostly restricted to research operating systems. Capabilities can, however, also be implemented at the language level, leading to a style of programming that is essentially a refinement of standard object-oriented design. An open-source project in the area is the E language.
The end-user is widely recognized as the weakest link in the security chain and it is estimated that more than 90% of security incidents are breaches involve some kind of human error. Among the most commonly recorded forms of errors and misjudgment are poor password management, sending emails containing sensitive data and attachments to the wrong recipient, the inability to recognize misleading URLs and to identify fake websites and dangerous email attachments. A common mistake that users make is saving their user ID/Password in their browsers to make it easier to log in to banking sites. This is a gift to attackers who have obtained access to the machine by some means. The risk may be mitigated by the use of two-factor authentication.
As the human component of cyber risk is particularly relevant in the global cyber risk, an organization is facing, security awareness training, at all levels not only provides formal compliance with regulatory and industry mandates but is considered essential in reducing cyber risk and protecting individuals and companies from the great majority of cyber threats.
The focus on end-user represents a profound change for many security practitioners, who have traditionally approached cybersecurity exclusively from a technical perspective and move along the lines suggested by major security centers to develop a culture of cyber awareness within the organization, recognizing that a security-aware user provides an important line of defense against cyber attacks.
Related to end-user training, digital hygiene or cyber hygiene is a fundamental principle relating to information security and, as the analogy with personal hygiene shows, is the equivalent of establishing simple routine measures to minimize the risks from cyber threats. The assumption is that good cyber hygiene practices can give networked users another layer of protection, reducing the risk that one vulnerable node will be used to either mount attacks or compromise another node or network, especially from common cyberattacks. Cyber hygiene should also not be mistaken for proactive cyber defense, a military term.
The most common acts of digital hygiene can include updating malware protection, cloud backups, and passwords, and ensuring restricted admin rights and network firewalls. As opposed to a purely technology-based defense against threats, cyber hygiene mostly regards routine measures that are technically simple to implement and mostly dependent on discipline or education. It can be thought of as an abstract list of tips or measures that have been demonstrated as having a positive effect on personal and/or collective digital security. As such, these measures can be performed by laypeople, not just security experts.
Cyber hygiene relates to personal hygiene as computer viruses relate to biological viruses (or pathogens). However, while the term computer virus was coined almost simultaneously with the creation of the first working computer viruses, the term cyber hygiene is a much later invention, perhaps as late as 2000 by internet pioneer Vint Cerf. It has since been adopted by the Congress and Senate of the United States, the FBI, EU institutions, and heads of state.
Responding to attempted security breaches is often very difficult for a variety of reasons, including;
Where an attack succeeds and a breach occurs, many jurisdictions now have in place mandatory security breach notification laws.
As with physical security, the motivations for breaches of computer security vary between attackers. Some are thrill-seekers or vandals, some are activists, and others are criminals looking for financial gain. State-sponsored attackers are now common and well-resourced but started with amateurs such as Markus Hess who hacked for the KGB, as recounted by Clifford Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg.
Attackers' motivation can vary for all types of attacks from pleasure to political goals. For example, 'hacktivists' may target a company or organization that carries out activities they do not agree with. This would be to create bad publicity for the company by having its website crash.
Highly capable hackers, often with larger backing or state sponsorship, may attack based on the demands of their financial backers. These attacks are more likely to attempt more serious attacks. An example of a more serious attack was the 2015 Ukraine power grid hack, which reportedly utilized spear-pishing, destruction of files, and denial-of-service attacks to carry out the full attack.
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