Posted: September 7th, 2024

Cyber-Attacks

Computer Sciences and Information Technology
Cyber-Attacks
Homework help – Write a minimum of 3-5 page research paper describing two of the following cyber-attacks:
Number one is mandatory. You can select any one of the remaining two available choices.
[1] DDoS Attack
[2] Buffer Overflow Attack
[3] ICMP Attack

You are expected to respond to each of the following requirements:
– What are the main attributes of these attacks?
– How do these cyber-attacks
– affect the victims’ infrastructure or devices once they penetrate to the victims’ devices or infrastructures?
– Describe the countermeasure (Detection or Prevention) for these attacks if available.
– Give an example of each attack (Company name, when it happened, how it affects the organization, and how it has been resolved
– How do you prepare and approach these attacks if you are assigned as a cybersecurity manager for an organization?
– Please list all the references that you referred to and cite them on your paper appropriately

The reference page should be a separate page.

Cyber-Attacks: DDoS and Buffer Overflow
Cyber-attacks are more than common these days; hence the ever-growing need to gain skills that can help one understand the different types of attacks. For a technician to distinguish between the various attacks, they have to know particular attributes for each type. This helps with ease in identification that can lead to appropriate decision-making skills when choosing a countermeasure. DDoS has two essential attributes. First, they come in the form of short attacks, and second, they are mostly under 1Gbps (Weagle, n.d). Since they do not last longer than five minutes, it is easy for the attack to evade detection. It becomes hard for IT security to catch each DDoS attack within the network due to their short volume and duration (Weagle, n.d). Buffer overflows are attributed to taking more than the allocated space in the buffer memory. When the designated memory location is full, the attacks move to the adjacent locations (Synopsys, 2017). Both DDoS and Buffer Overflow is overwhelming attacks that can affect their victims once they penetrate the system. Based on these attributes, one should understand the extreme repercussions offered by DDoS and buffer overflow attacks to arrive at countermeasures that can aid their company.
The effects of DDoS and Buffer Overflow attacks are adverse and can cause damage to the computer infrastructure. A DDoS attack is known to shut down infrastructure or device functions, making it inaccessible to its users. The traffic is normally flooded with information making it useless. A simpler example is a traffic jam that clogs up the road, preventing regular vehicles from joining the highway and proceeding to their destination. DDoS attacks cripple the computer architecture and devices such that there is no progress. Buffer overflows are an example of DDoS attacks, but they work through the flooding technique where the memory spaces experience more data than it can handle. This causes the infrastructure programs to generate incorrect results, behave unpredictably, crash, or cause memory access errors. With a Buffer Overflow, the memory is constantly overwritten hence affecting the infrastructure.
Countermeasures are necessary to help organizations or individuals detect and prevent their networks from DDoS and Buffer Overflow Attacks. Since these two attacks are almost similar, the countermeasures are not far apart. Unneeded services should be disabled while firewalls are installed to filter the addresses, packets, and ports. Firewalls are essential to determine what is allowed through the network. Intrusion-based prevention systems (IPS) and Intrusion Detection Systems are also necessary for detection and prevention (Petters, 2020). While an IDS only records and logs attacks, an IPS is expected to do the rest. An IPS is a network security technique that functions by detecting and mitigating threats on the network. This way, identified threats such as DDoS and buffer Overflow attacks will be minimized.
As much as technology has improved business revenues, it also poses attacks to the same companies that benefit from it. An example of a DDoS attack occurred in February of 2018, targeting GitHub (Felter, 2019). For about 20minutes, GitHub systems were down. Considering millions of users depend on GitHub to manage their code online, the threat was likely to affect many organizations if it lasted any longer. GitHub is said to have faced a record-breaking DDoS of 1.3 Tbps. Each second saw 126.9 million packets of data being sent to the servers. Luckily, the company was able to use a DDoS mitigation service to resolve the issue. The Morris Worm is the most popular buffer overflow attack as it targeted 20% of the Internet. For two years, 1998-1990, the attack infected over sixty thousand machines. It cost $200-$53,000 per location to resolve the issue. Some of the strategies involved isolating some of the infected machines that kept on being re-infected.
A cybersecurity manager needs to have strategies that enable him/her to prepare and approach the attacks effectively. It is essential to ensure that a system checklist is developed, a response team is formed, and notification and escalation procedures are defined. In some cases, it is only reasonable that a contact list is created to determine internal and external people/firms that should be informed in an attack (Dobrana, 2018). Together with technical approaches, these measures will form a holistic approach to detect and prevent the system from an attack.
In conclusion, cyberattacks are a common anomaly that most network architectures and devices face today. DDoS and Buffer overflow are two attacks that occur regularly and will most likely torment unaware organizations. While these attacks do not steal information from the network, they cost their targets a great deal of time and money. Taking the necessary precautions is necessary to avoid long downtimes hence consumer grievances. Acquiring IDS and IPS systems is a reliable option since IT security cannot be held accountable for not catching every packet on the network. Besides the technical, logical approaches used by IT managers can aid equip the company with a clear strategy to follow in the event of an attack.
References
Dobran, B. (2018). 7 Tactics to Prevent DDoS Attacks and Keep Your Website Safe. Retrieved from https://phoenixnap.com/blog/prevent-ddos-attacks
Felter, B. (2019). 5 of the most Famous Recent DDoS Attacks. Retrieved from https://www.vxchnge.com/blog/recent-ddos-attacks-on-companies
Petters, J. (2020). IDS v. IPS: What is the Difference? Retrieved from https://www.varonis.com/blog/ids-vs-ips/
Synopsys. (2017). How to detect, prevent, and mitigate buffer overflow attacks. Retrieved from https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/detect-prevent-and-mitigate-buffer-overflow-attacks/
Weagle, S. (n.d). 5 essential qualities to look out for in a DDoS mitigation Solution. Retrieved from https://www.corero.com/blog/5-essential-qualities-to-look-for-in-a-ddos-mitigation-solution/

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