Ethical Hacking: Techniques, Tools, and Countermeasures, 4th Edition

Session Hijacking

Another type of attack that can be used to alter and interrupt communications on a network is session hijacking. This technique falls within the category of active attacks, because the attacker must directly and aggressively interact with the network and the victims on it. Hijacking builds on the techniques discussed in the previous section on sniffing, but raises the stakes by taking over the communication between two parties. Once attackers decide to engage in session hijacking, they will be actively injecting packets into the network with the goal of disrupting and taking over an existing session on the network. Ultimately, the session hijacker will attempt to take over a session that is already authenticated to a resource ...