Information Security Management, 2nd Edition

6.3 Broad Attack Classifications and Examples

Now that we have covered some of the major information technologies and systems topics important in cybersecurity, we will delve into the four classifications of threats: (1) availability (interruption), (2) authenticity (masquerade), (3) privacy/confidentiality (interception), and (4) integrity (modification). We will also briefly cover types of attack vectors, some of which may be threats to more than one threat classification. For instance, malware may both interrupt an application or OS service and modify or destroy important data and/or files. Broadly, attacks can be classified into active and passive attacks, although many attacks use both.

A typical scenario used by an attacker is to first ...