Cybersecurity guide for developing countries This response must meet the imperatives of national security and security of organizations and individuals. It must help keep cybercrime to an acceptable level, strengthen confidence in the digital world and minimize the risk of corruption and the threat to the public authorities. Section II.2 – Cyberattacks II.2.1 Types of cyberattack There are various ways of exploiting the possibilities offered by internet technologies. More often than not, they are based on the appropriation of the connection parameters or passwords of legitimate users, on deception and on exploiting the flaws and vulnerabilities of the technologies. II.2.2 Theft of users’ passwords to penetrate systems The main methods used to obtain the connection parameters of legitimate users to gain access to systems are: – Guessing: The password is so obvious (name of user, spouse or child, birthday, etc.) that the account is essentially unprotected. – Deception (social engineering): The attacker poses as an administrator and asks for the password, under some technical pretext. In a surprisingly large number of cases, users will reveal their data. – Listening to traffic: The attacker intercepts or listens to unencrypted data transmitted over the network through communication protocols (sniffing, monitoring). – Software: A “Trojan horse” is infiltrated into a user’s workstation, where it clandestinely records the parameters used to connect to remote systems. – Accessing the password storage file. – Cracking passwords that are sent in encrypted form. – Spying on users by activating their multimedia peripherals to record their connection parameters. Once in possession of the access key necessary to get into the systems (the combination of username and password), it is easy to penetrate the systems and carry out all sorts of read and write operations. The challenge for the hacker is to avoid being detected and to leave no trace of his presence in the systems accessed. II.2.3 Denial-of-service attacks A denial-of-service attack is typically carried out by overloading system capacity. Targeted systems, inundated with far more requests than they are equipped to cope with, crash and become unavailable. These attacks can be perpetrated by taking advantage of flaws in the operating system and exploiting certain system features, for example, buffer management (buffer overflow attack), causing serious malfunctioning which can lead to system shutdown. E-mail bombing, which involves flooding a user’s inbox with messages, is one form of a denial-ofservice attack. 44 Cyberattacks