Hacking: The Next Generation

Contents of This Book

This book is divided into 10 chapters. Here’s a summary of what we cover:

Chapter 1, Intelligence Gathering: Peering Through the Windows to Your Organization

To successfully execute an attack against any given organization, the attacker must first perform reconnaissance to gather as much intelligence about the organization as possible. In this chapter, we look at traditional attack methods as well as how the new generation of attackers is able to leverage new technologies for information gathering.

Chapter 2, Inside-Out Attacks: The Attacker Is the Insider

Not only does the popular perimeter-based approach to security provide little risk reduction today, but it is in fact contributing to an increased attack surface that criminals are using to launch potentially devastating attacks. The impact of the attacks illustrated in this chapter can be extremely devastating to businesses that approach security with a perimeter mindset where the insiders are generally trusted with information that is confidential and critical to the organization.

Chapter 3, The Way It Works: There Is No Patch

The protocols that support network communication, which are relied upon for the Internet to work, were not specifically designed with security in mind. In this chapter, we study why these protocols are weak and how attackers have and will continue to exploit them.

Chapter 4, Blended Threats: When Applications Exploit Each Other

The amount of software installed on a modern computer system is staggering. With so many different software packages on a single machine, the complexity of managing the interactions between these software packages becomes increasingly complex. Complexity is the friend of the next-generation hacker. This chapter exposes the techniques used to pit software against software. We present the various blended threats and blended attacks so that you can gain some insight as to how these attacks are executed and the thought process behind blended exploitation.

Chapter 5, Cloud Insecurity: Sharing the Cloud with Your Enemy

Cloud computing is seen as the next generation of computing. The benefits, cost savings, and business justifications for moving to a cloud-based environment are compelling. This chapter illustrates how next-generation hackers are positioning themselves to take advantage of and abuse cloud platforms, and includes tangible examples of vulnerabilities we have discovered in today’s popular cloud platforms.

Chapter 6, Abusing Mobile Devices: Targeting Your Mobile Workforce

Today’s workforce is a mobile army, traveling to the customer and making business happen. The explosion of laptops, wireless networks, and powerful cell phones, coupled with the need to “get things done,” creates a perfect storm for the next-generation attacker. This chapter walks through some scenarios showing how the mobile workforce can be a prime target of attacks.

Chapter 7, Infiltrating the Phishing Underground: Learning from Online Criminals?

Phishers are a unique bunch. They are a nuisance to businesses and legal authorities and can cause a significant amount of damage to a person’s financial reputation. In this chapter, we infiltrate and uncover this ecosystem so that we can shed some light on and advance our quest toward understanding this popular subset of the new generation of criminals.

Chapter 8, Influencing Your Victims: Do What We Tell You, Please

The new generation of attackers doesn’t want to target only networks, operating systems, and applications. These attackers also want to target the people who have access to the data they want to get a hold of. It is sometimes easier for an attacker to get what she wants by influencing and manipulating a human being than it is to invest a lot of time finding and exploiting a technical vulnerability. In this chapter, we look at the crafty techniques attackers employ to discover information about people to influence them.

Chapter 9, Hacking Executives: Can Your CEO Spot a Targeted Attack?

When attackers begin to focus their attacks on specific corporate individuals, executives often become the prime target. These are the “C Team” members of the company—for instance, chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief operating officers. Not only are these executives in higher income brackets than other potential targets, but also the value of the information on their laptops can rival the value of information in the corporation’s databases. This chapter walks through scenarios an attacker may use to target executives of large corporations.

Chapter 10, Case Studies: Different Perspectives

This chapter presents two scenarios on how a determined hacker can cross-pollinate vulnerabilities from different processes, systems, and applications to compromise businesses and steal confidential data.

In addition to these 10 chapters, the book also includes two appendixes. Appendix A provides the source code samples from Chapter 2, and Appendix B provides the complete Cache_snoop.pl script, which is designed to aid in exploiting DNS servers that are susceptible to DNS cache snooping.