Cyber attack

A cyber attack is a belligerent operation that is aimed towards a government, organization, or person's computer networks, information systems, and infrastructure. Other terms for this are cyberwarfare and hacking. Cyber attacks have recently become very complex and various hackers have successfully been able to infiltrate and breach important entities including hospitals and e-mail services.

Syntactic attacks are the most common, as they are straight-forward and malware based. The three main syntactic attacks are Viruses, Worms, and Trojan Horses. These programs are typically downloaded through social engineering maneuvers through e-mail and social media.

Computer Viruses are programs that contain malicious code that infects devices and replicate themselves across other computers on a network. Trojans Horses are programs which are typically accidentally downloaded through social engineering attacks. Trojans sit on an empty port of a computer, which serves as a backdoor in the infected device. This allows a hacker to have remote access to one's computer, also o referred to as a backdoor.

For computer networks and devices, these methods of malware are used to create cyber attacks such as Man-In-The-Middle attacks, Denial of Service (DoS/DDoS), Phishing, and Keylogging.

A Man-In-The-Middle attack is a maneuver that allows a malicious user to eavesdrop on a computer network. This is done several ways, including ARP-spoofing and DNS-spoofing. ARP-Spoofing is done by poisoning a computer network's arp-cache by sending fake arp packets that assign's a network's real router with false addresses and in return acting as a proxy router to other computers on the network. A Denial of Service attack, commonly abbreviated as DOS or DDoS is an attack where a hacker creates bogus packets that clog a network and cause devices and firewalls to fall offline.

Phishing is a form of social engineering where a hacker creates an email that sends a user to a link that asks for important user information such as e-mail, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers and more. Keylogging is another social engineering hack that is done often implemented through a malware program that tracks a user's keystrokes in order to retrieve valuable information including passwords, search history, and so on.

Some infamous cyber attacks include the MafiaBoy DDoS attack on corporations such as Amazon, CNN, eBay, Yahoo! which costed nearly a billion dollars in damages. Others include the 1999 NASA and US Defense Department cyber attack, the Google China Hack, and 1995 Porsche-Winner Hack. These attacks caused serious harm to computer devices and infrastructure.Each attack caused at least 100 million dollars in damage and on the higher end, it was in the billions. A recent cyber attack that is said to have affected up to 143 million people is the Equifax Breach in 2017.

References:
https://techterms.com/definition/trojanhorse

https://apnews.com/2c25d7da76f4409bae7daf063c071420/what-makes-cyberattack-experts-lobby-restrict-term

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cyberattacks