Hacking Motivations and Techniques
You are sitting on the balcony of a coffee shop in Paris enjoying a cup of coffee and decide to log into your favorite social media site to update your friends on your exotic vacation. You enter your name and password and are surprised when your login attempt fails. Thinking that you mistyped your password, you carefully re-enter it-only to be denied access to your account again. Not sure what the problem is, you click the link to reset your password. After resetting your password, you are able to gain access to your social media page and discover that your page has turned into a promotional site for some band named "Pixel the Pony." Your social media account has been hacked! It could have been hacked for fun, publicity, revenge, or any number of reasons. The hacker could be almost anyone. You likely will never know who hacked your account or why.
IT professionals can neither predict when the next attack will occur nor what the real motivations behind such an attack might be. Even when the best measures are employed, computer systems are vulnerable. For example, an IT department might be well prepared to defend against attackers trying to compromise their organization's financial servers, but insufficiently prepared to defend against nation states looking to steal intellectual property.
Understanding common motivations behind hacking is important. IT professionals can use these motivations to try to predict potential targets. For example, a disgruntled employee, motivated by revenge, might want to delete months of research data. Likewise, a hacker, motivated by publicity, might want to deface a Fortune 500 company's website. Knowing these common motivations, IT professionals might back up the research data multiple times daily and/or require supervisor authorization to delete data. In the case of the Fortune 500 company, they might change their web server's password daily.
To prepare for this Discussion, use the interactive media Simulated Network Attack, located in this unit's Learning Resources. Also, find two recent news events that you believe are hacking-related and analyze them for possible motivations and techniques.
By Day 4, Explain why you have concluded these motivations are hacking-related and what techniques might have been used to exploit the vulnerabilities. For one of your news events, explain which Simulated Network Attack case it best matches.