The year 2020 has witnessed a shift in the digital ecosystem as major number of employees have taken a turn towards working from home. Thus, most organizational networks are now being accessed remotely by employees sitting at diverse locations spanning across the globe. This has given rise to new opportunities for hackers who are exploring different techniques to disrupt the vulnerable networks.

Here is a list of popular modern hacking techniques:

• H2C Smuggling: H2C stands for HTTP/2 cleartext. These attacks abuse H2C unaware front-ends to create a tunnel to backend systems. This enables the attackers to bypass frontend rewrite rules and exploit internal HTTP headers.
• Portable Data exFiltration: Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks are extensively being used to compromise data stored in PDF files and exfiltrate it to a remote server. The rate of these attacks has extensively increased with the increasing popularity of server-side PDF generation such as generation of e-tickets, boarding passes, etc. These PDF documents often contain sensitive information including bank details, passport numbers, addresses, and other personal data. In this attack, a malicious injection vector is injected into the PDF. When a user clicks on the link or anywhere in the PDF, the hacker can extract all the sensitive information entered by the user.
• TLS Attacks: Exploiting features of TLS (Transport Layer Security) makes it possible to land Server Side Request Forgery attacks. The attack technique involves exploiting technologies involved with TLS session caching. The hacker can manipulate the session to send a TLS session ID ticket or psk (pre-shared key) identity to his server.
• NAT Slipstreaming: NAT slipstreaming exploits the victim’s browser in conjunction with the Application Level Gateway (ALG) connection tracking mechanism built into NATs, routers, and firewalls. This is done by chaining internal IP extraction via timing attack or WebRTC, automated remote MTU and IP fragmentation discovery, protocol confusion through browser abuse, etc. As the destination ports are opened by NAT or firewall, this helps in bypassing any browser-based port restrictions.

Understanding of the hacking techniques is essential to formulate effective prevention strategy against modern hacking attacks. An effective prevention strategy is important to ensure the safety of organization’s network and individual user systems. A loophole in the cyber security strategy can cause major losses in terms of stolen data, user information, business secrets, etc.

For more information on popular modern hacking techniques, call Centex Technologies at (972) 375 - 9654.        

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In a practical environment, a cyber security strategy is actually an amalgamation of multiple strategies. Cyber security professionals employ different strategies in coordination with each other in order to ensure a multidimensional protection against cyber threats.

Here is a brief guide to cyber security strategies:

Creating A Secure Cyber Ecosystem: The cyber ecosystem involves a wide range of entities including devices, individuals, management, private organizations, etc. which interact with each other. This strategy emphasizes on having a robust cyber ecosystem that would permit its devices to interact in a secure manner. A strong cyber ecosystem has three symbiotic structures – automation, interoperability, and authentication.

Creating An Assurance Framework: The basic objective of this strategy is to design an outline in compliance with global security standards. The framework that is designed is in compliance with industry wide standards, guidelines, and practices. These parameters help businesses to manage cyber security related risks.

Encouraging Industry Standards: Standards help in defining the outline of how an organization approaches the information security related issues. Implementation of cyber security standards enhance the efficiency of security processes, enable systems incorporations, provide a medium to test new applications, organize the approach to arrange new technologies in the cyber framework, etc.

Creating Mechanisms For IT Security: Different IT security mechanisms differ in their internal application features and attributes of security they provide. Following are the common IT security mechanisms:

• Link Oriented Measures
• End-To-End Measures
• Association-Oriented Measures
• Data Encryption

Protecting Critical Information: Critical information such as user data, login credentials, financial data, business trade secrets, etc. is the backbone of any organization. Safeguarding critical information against growing cyber threats needs a structured approach. This strategy can be implemented via following steps:

• Defining critical information
• Categorizing the available information
• Prioritizing information categories
• Securing the most critical information
• Testing the framework
• Securing the second category and repeating the cycle

Security As A Service: SaaS providers offer a cyber security solution with different attributes to meet diverse cyber security needs of organizations. This strategy can be implemented based on 5 C’s:

• Change – Organizations face changing pressures from different sources such as competitive threats, new regulations, internal threats, cyber threats, etc. SaaS model enable organizations to respond to these changes quickly.
• Compliance – SaaS solutions are designed keeping in mind the governances, regulations, etc.
• Cost – SaaS provides an alternative cyber security solution allowing the in-house IT teams to focus on core business.
• Continuity – Multi-tenant SaaS services are hosted in highly reliable data centers with built-in redundancy.
• Coverage – SaaS solutions offer clear benefits with geographically dispersed sites allowing easy management of remote users.

For more information on basics of cyber security strategy, call Centex Technologies at (972) 375 - 9654.