Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

By : Tim Rains
3 (2)
Book Image

Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies - Second Edition

3 (2)
By: Tim Rains

Overview of this book

Tim Rains is Microsoft's former Global Chief Security Advisor and Amazon Web Services’ former Global Security Leader for Worldwide Public Sector. He has spent the last two decades advising private and public sector organizations all over the world on cybersecurity strategies. Cybersecurity Threats, Malware Trends, and Strategies, Second Edition builds upon the success of the first edition that has helped so many aspiring CISOs, and cybersecurity professionals understand and develop effective data-driven cybersecurity strategies for their organizations. In this edition, you’ll examine long-term trends in vulnerability disclosures and exploitation, regional differences in malware infections and the socio-economic factors that underpin them, and how ransomware evolved from an obscure threat to the most feared threat in cybersecurity. You’ll also gain valuable insights into the roles that governments play in cybersecurity, including their role as threat actors, and how to mitigate government access to data. The book concludes with a deep dive into modern approaches to cybersecurity using the cloud. By the end of this book, you will have a better understanding of the threat landscape, how to recognize good Cyber Threat Intelligence, and how to measure the effectiveness of your organization's cybersecurity strategy.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
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Index

Drive-by download attacks

While phishing attacks are at the intersection of social engineering and weak, leaked, and stolen passwords, drive-by download attacks are at the intersection of social engineering and unpatched vulnerabilities. Drive-by attacks are typically performed by attackers using social engineering to trick users into visiting a malicious website. They can do this several ways, including via email, online ads, putting links to malicious sites in the comments sections of webpages and social network posts, and many other tactics. Sometimes, attackers compromise a legitimate website and use it to host drive-by download attacks; the more popular the website, the better for the attackers as it increases their chances of successfully compromising as many systems as possible.

Getting potential victims to malicious websites under the control of attackers is the first step in the attack. The next step is to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities on the victims' systems. To do...