By Imesh Ranasinghe
We have come across cyber attacks and hacks of government websites or even social media accounts of people we know but it is a human trait to not to take anything that is shocking the world seriously, till it happens to himself.
You might not understand the value of your personal data until it’s breached.You might think you are an ordinary person and certainly not a VIP, but cybercriminals could use your data to cover up their real identities which will put you in trouble. Globally, cybersecurity is taken as a serious matter as predictions for losses from cybercrimes reached a $ 1 trillion mark in 2020 with the Covid-19 pandemic.
What is a cyber attack?
A cyber attack can maliciously disable computers, steal data, or use a breached computer as a launch point for other attacks. The most common type of cyber attacks are;
- Malware: It is a type of application that can perform a variety of malicious tasks. Some strains of malware are designed to create persistent access to a network, some are designed to spy on the user in order to obtain credentials or other valuable data, while some are simply designed to cause disruption
- Phishing: It is where the attacker tries to trick an unsuspecting victim into handing over valuable information, such as passwords, credit card details, intellectual property, and so on
- Man-in-the-middle attack (MITM): It is where an attacker intercepts the communication between two parties in an attempt to spy on the victims, steal personal information or credentials, or perhaps alter the conversation in some way
- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack: It is an attack where an attacker essentially floods a target server with traffic in an attempt to disrupt, and perhaps even bring down the target. However, unlike traditional denial-of-service attacks, which most sophisticated firewalls can detect and respond to, a DDoS attack is able to leverage multiple compromised devices to bombard the target with traffic