Network Security - Breaches

Two (2) network security breaches

Phishing
Definition

• It is a fraud action that make use of the electronic communications to get what they want from the current user that they target
• This is to attempt taking the sensitive, confidential information (passwords, credit cart information)

How it work? And what happen

• The person who wants to get the information might act like a legitimate individual or institution from a phone call or email 
• Example by email. They send a link to the person and if the person click on the link it will automatically directing the person who send the email to get any information that they want from the user. 

How to prevent?

• Organizations can train the employee on how to recognize any suspicious email, links or attachments.
• The person who are doing this breach are always refining their techniques, in order to deal with this, continued education is imperative
• Some tell-tale signs of a phishing email include:

1. Poor spelling and grammar
2. Threats of account shutdown
3. Unexpected attachments that usually ends with ".exe" files

• Additional technical security measures:

1. Two factor authentication (two methods of identifying confirmation i.e password)
2. Have other password logins (using personal images, security skins)

Password Attacks/Cracking
Definition

• Refers to the several measures to discover the computer passwords
• Usually accomplished by the recovering passwords from the data that are stored in or transported from the computer system

How it works?

• This is done by guessing the password repeatedly usually through a algorithm of the computer where the computer tries numerous combinations until the password are correctly discovered

How to prevent?

• The user must make sure that they password are strong, which must have at least eight (8) characters long
• The password must contain a combination of mixed-case random letters, digits or symbols
• Strong password must not be an actual words 

References:

Forcepoint. (2018). What is Phishing?. [online] Available at: https://www.forcepoint.com/cyber-edu/phishing-attack [Accessed 8 Oct. 2019].

Techopedia.com. (2019). What is Password Cracking? - Definition from Techopedia. [online] Available at: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/4044/password-cracking [Accessed 8 Oct. 2019].