Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

The book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Exploiting a vulnerability


Hackers have been known to take the time to study the systems used by targets in order to identify any vulnerabilities. For instance, WikiLeaks has often said that the NSA does the same thing, and so far a database of vulnerabilities exists on computing devices, commonly used software systems, and even everyday devices. Their stored exploits have been outed by a hacking group called The Shadow Brokers, who regularly leak some of the vulnerabilities that the agency keeps. Some of the previously released vulnerabilities have been used by black hats to create powerful malware such as WannaCry. To summarize, there are hacking groups and many other government agencies studying software systems to find exploitable vulnerabilities.

The exploitation of vulnerabilities is done when hackers take advantage of bugs in a software system; this could be within an operating system, the kernel, or a web-based system. The vulnerabilities provide loopholes through which hackers can...