When your email is used to attack you.

Phishing emails will often look legitimate and will entice you to open an attachment or click on a link.  But once you do, it will infect your device with malware, encrypt your files and hold them to ransom or take you to a malicious website that will encourage you to enter log in details and personal information.

Man-in-the-middle attacks is very similar to ‘eavesdropping’. They occur when attackers secretly interrupt the traffic, they can filter and steal data.

Two common ways Man-in-the-middle-attacks occur:

1. On non-secure public WiFi networks. These type of attackers can put themselves between a visitors device and the network. Without knowing, the visitor passes all in information through the attacker.

2. Once malware has breached a device, an attacker can install software to access all of the victim’s information.

A denial-of-service is any type of attack where the hackers attempt to prevent legitimate users from accessing their system.

The attacker usually sends a large amount of messages asking the network or server to authenticate requests that have invalid return addresses. The network or server will not be able to find the return address of the attacker when sending the authentication approval, causing the server to wait before closing the connection.

When the server closes the connection, the attacker sends more authentication messages with invalid return addresses. 

1. Brute Force Attacks

A hacker uses a computer program or script to try to log in with possible password combinations, usually starting with the easiest-to-guess passwords. So just think: if a hacker has a company list, he or she can easily guess usernames. If even one of the users has a “Password123”, the hacker will quickly be able to get in.

2. Dictionary Attack

A dictionary attack tries only those possibilities which are most likely to succeed, typically derived from a list of words (for example a dictionary). Generally, dictionary attacks succeed because many people have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7 characters or fewer), such as single words found in dictionaries or simple, easily predicted variations on words.

3. Key Logger Attack

A hacker uses a program to track all of a user’s keystrokes. So at the end of the day, everything the user has typed—including their login IDs and passwords have been recorded.

The key logging program used is malware (or a full-blown virus) that must first make it onto the user’s device (often the user is tricked into downloading it by clicking on a link in an email). Key logger attacks are also different because stronger passwords don’t provide much protection against them, which is one reason that Two-Factor Authentication should be a must-have for your business.