Internet Attacks

BY: Piyush Mittal

What is internet?
The Internet is a worldwide IP network, that links collection of different networks from various sources, governmental, educational and commercial.

Problem regarding internet---Identification problem.

identify network (most complicated): logical addressing identify host within the network : physical addressing identify the process within the host: service point addressing

Types of attacks
Social engineering Impersonation
Stealing access rights of authorized users

Transitive trust
Exploiting host-host or network-network trust

Data driven Trojans, viruses Infrastructure

Taking advantage of protocol or infrastructure features or bugs

Denial of service
Preventing system from being used

Magic
New things nobody has seen yet bugs

Social engineering
Fooling the victim for fun and profit

Example
Attacker calls switchboard and impersonates employee this is Dr. XXX trying to reach the data center. Calls data center this is Dr. XXX my modem is not working, has the modem pool ## changed? Gets modem pool phone ## and name of system manager from data center operator Calls computer room, this is <system manager> - Ive accidentally locked myself , can you do the following on the console for me?... Dials in and logs in

 Very hard to protect against it How to protect against it:

Educate staff Have well-known mechanisms for problem reporting and handling Identify transactions that must be done in person.

Impersonation
Stealing access rights of authorized users

Example :
-College students place tap on serial lines between modem closet and computer room -Late-night monitoring set up at cross-wired terminal - System manager logs in and sets privilege - Attacker later logs into system with stolen passwords

Transitive trust
A trust that can extend beyond two domains to other trusted domains in the forest. Example :
Network of workstations share files via NFS Attacker compromises a client workstations administrator account Attacker can create privileged executables on file systems exported from server Attacker creates privileged executable on server then logs in as normal user Attacker executes privileged program and gains privilege on file server

Prevention
Current software suites do not have adequate mechanisms for trust delegation and containment System admins must carefully map out trust relationships between hosts on networks Consider internal firewalls

Data driven attacks

Trojans, viruses.

Example :
Attacker on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) tells users to obtain a utility program that will help them use system better Users download program and run it Program deletes all users files and emails a copy of password file to attacker

Prevention
-Firewall can help screen out.

-Restricting services can help reduce potential for attack. -Educate users about not just executing anything they are given.

Infrastructure attacks
Example : (Source Routing)
-IP protocol specifies that source-routed traffic should return on the reverse route from which it came -Attacker selects a trusted host within the target network and knocks it off the air using ICMP bombing -Attacker sets address of his system to that of the trusted host -Attacker uses rlogin with source routed packets -Target host sees packets coming from trusted machine and may permit better access

Prevention
-Defeat source routing with firewalls that block and log source

routed packets -Many routers can block source routed packets

Example : (TCP sequence guessing)

- TCP connections rely on an increasing sequence number to correctly order traffic over connection. -If an attacker knows the sequence numbers of a connection stream he can generate correct-looking packets even though the response packets do not reach him. In order for attack to work ,response packets must not reach the correct destination.

Example : (TCP splicing) Attacker between networks watches for a legitimate

connection Waits until after user has logged in Steals connection and becomes user

Denial of service attacks

Denial of service(DoS) is very common attack . it may slow down or totally interrupt the service of a system . The attacker can use several strategies to achieve this she might send so many bogus request s to a server that the server crashes because of the heavy load . The attacker might intercept and delete a servers response to a client making the client to believe that the server is not responding. The attacker may also intercept requests from the clients , causing the clients to send request many times and overload the system.

Magic attacks
-We dont know what these will look like -Theyre the attack that someone hasnt thought of yet -Attack will be utterly mysterious in origin and will surprise everyone -Hopefully it will be easy to fix

What does the future hold?

-Host-based software will continue to be buggy and unreliable from a security standpoint -Vendors will continue to add security as an afterthought rather than designing it in from the beginning -Encryption will be more widely deployed in spite of government restrictions

Summary
-Attackers are performing active R&D to figure out how to break into networks -Some attacks very technical -Some attacks very low tech

Refrences
www.wikkipedia.com Cryptography and Network Security by Behrouz A. Forouzan www.Siemens.com/Answers www.us-cert.gov

Thanks