What are the Information Security Attack?


Attacks are defined as passive and active. A passive attack is an attempt to understand or create use of data from the system without influencing system resources; whereas an active attack is an attempt to change system resources or influence their operation.

Passive Attacks − Passive attacks are in the feature of eavesdropping on, or observation of, transmissions. The objective of the opponent is to access data that is being transmitted. There are two method of passive attacks are release of message contents and traffic analysis.

The release of message contents is simply learn. A telephone chat, an electronic mail message, and a transferred file can include sensitive or confidential data. It is like to avoid an opponent from understanding the contents of these transmissions.

A second method of passive attack are traffic analysis. Assume that it is an approach of hiding the contents of messages or some information traffic so that opponents, even if they acquired the message, could not extract the data from the message.

The general approach for masking contents is encryption. If it can have an encryption security in area, an opponent can be able to find the duplicate of these messages.

The opponent can decide the location and identity of broadcasting hosts and can detect the frequency and magnitude of messages being exchanged. This data can be beneficial in guessing the feature of the communication that was creating place.

Active Attacks − Active attacks contains some modification of the data flow or the creation of a false flow and can be subdivided into four elements such as masquerade, replay, modification of messages, and denial of service.

Replay − Replay contains the passive capture of an information unit and its consecutive retransmission to create an unauthorized development.

Masquerade − A masquerade creates place when one entity impersonate to be a various entity. A masquerade attack generally involves one of the multiple forms of active attack.

For instance, authentication array can be captured and replayed after a true authentication array has taken place, therefore allowing an authorized entity with some privileges to acquire more privileges by imitate an entity that has those privileges.

Modification of messages − Modification of message simply defines that some portion of a legitimate message is transformed, or that messages are held up or reordered, to make an unauthorized effect.

Denial of Service − The denial of service avoids or prevent the general use or administration of communications facilities. This attack can have a definite focus. For instance, an entity can suppress some messages supervised to a specific destination.

Another type of service denial is the division of an entire network, either by damaging the network or by overloading it with messages so as to corrupt performance.

Updated on: 10-Mar-2022

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