Читать книгу Cybersecurity For Dummies - Joseph Steinberg - Страница 78

If you listen to the news during a report of a major cyberbreach, you’ll frequently hear commentators referring to advanced attacks. While some cyberattacks are clearly more complex than others and require greater technical prowess to launch, no specific, objective definition of an advanced attack exists. That said, from a subjective perspective, you may consider any attack that requires a significant investment in research and development to be successfully executed to be advanced. Of course, the definition of significant investment is also subjective. In some cases, R&D expenditures are so high and attacks are so sophisticated that there is near universal agreement that an attack was advanced. Some experts consider any zero-day attack to be advanced, but others disagree.

Advanced attacks may be opportunistic, targeted, or a combination of both.

Opportunistic attacks are attacks aimed at as many possible targets as possible in order to find some that are susceptible to the attack that was launched. The attacker doesn’t have a list of predefined targets — the attacker’s targets are effectively any and all reachable systems that are vulnerable to the launched attack. These attacks are similar to someone firing a massive shotgun in an area with many targets in the hope that one or more pellets will hit a target that it can penetrate.

Targeted attacks are attacks that target a specific party and typically involve utilizing a series of attack techniques until one eventually succeeds in penetrating into the target. Additional attacks may be launched subsequently in order to move around within the target’s systems.