Attacks & Threats terms

81 terms

• Phishing

  A social-engineering attack in which an attacker impersonates a trusted party to trick a victim into revealing credentials, transferring money, or running malware.

• Spear Phishing

  A targeted phishing attack tailored to a specific individual or organization using personal or professional details collected in advance.

• Whaling

  A spear-phishing attack aimed at senior executives or other high-value targets, typically seeking large fraudulent payments or access to strategic information.

• Smishing

  Phishing delivered via SMS or other mobile-messaging channels to trick victims into clicking malicious links, calling fraudulent numbers, or revealing data.

• Vishing

  Phishing conducted over voice channels — phone calls or VoIP — to manipulate victims into revealing credentials, payments, or remote access.

• Pharming

  An attack that silently redirects users from a legitimate site to a malicious one by tampering with DNS, hosts files, or local routing — without requiring the victim to click a link.

• Man-in-the-Middle Attack

  An attack in which an adversary secretly relays or alters communications between two parties who believe they are talking directly to each other.

• Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attack

  A denial-of-service attack carried out from many distributed sources simultaneously — typically a botnet — to overwhelm a target's bandwidth, infrastructure, or application.

• Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack

  An attack that exhausts a system's bandwidth, compute, memory, or application resources so that legitimate users can no longer access the service.

• DDoS Amplification

  A DDoS technique that abuses UDP-based services to reflect responses many times larger than the spoofed request, allowing small attackers to generate massive flood volumes.

• DNS Amplification Attack

  A reflection DDoS attack that abuses open DNS resolvers by sending small queries with the victim's spoofed IP, causing resolvers to send large DNS responses to the victim.

• NTP Amplification Attack

  A reflection DDoS attack abusing the NTP MONLIST (and similar) commands to make NTP servers reply with very large packets to a spoofed victim address.

• SYN Flood

  A TCP-based denial-of-service attack that sends many SYN packets without completing the three-way handshake, exhausting the target's connection-state resources.

• Ping of Death

  A legacy denial-of-service attack that sends malformed or oversized ICMP echo packets, causing vulnerable TCP/IP stacks to crash, hang, or reboot when reassembling them.

• Teardrop Attack

  A legacy DoS attack that sends IP fragments with overlapping, malformed offsets to crash TCP/IP stacks that mishandle reassembly.

• LAND Attack

  A legacy DoS attack that sends a spoofed TCP SYN packet whose source IP and port equal the destination, causing vulnerable systems to loop or crash.

• Smurf Attack

  A legacy amplification DDoS that sends ICMP echo requests to a network's broadcast address with the victim's IP spoofed as the source, causing every host on that network to reply to the victim.

• Fraggle Attack

  A UDP variant of the Smurf attack that sends spoofed UDP echo or chargen packets to a network's broadcast address, causing every responding host to flood the victim.

• Session Hijacking

  An attack that takes over a victim's authenticated session by stealing or forging the session identifier so the attacker can act as the user without their credentials.

• Cookie Hijacking

  Theft and reuse of a user's HTTP cookies — typically session or authentication cookies — to impersonate that user against a web application.

• Cookie Poisoning

  An attack that modifies the contents of HTTP cookies before they are sent back to a web application, in order to alter trust, identity, or business logic decisions.

• Clickjacking

  A UI-redress attack that tricks users into clicking on something different from what they perceive by overlaying or hiding a target page inside an attacker-controlled page.

• Tabnabbing

  An attack where a background or newly opened browser tab silently rewrites itself to look like a trusted login page, hoping the user returns and re-enters credentials.

• Typosquatting

  Registering domain names or package names that are misspellings or visual look-alikes of legitimate ones, to catch users or developers who make typing or recognition errors.

• Cybersquatting

  Registering domain names that contain trademarks or well-known brand names without authorization, typically to extract money from the rights holder or to deceive users.

• Domain Hijacking

  The unauthorized takeover of control over a registered domain name at the registrar or registry level, allowing an attacker to redirect traffic, email, and trust to malicious infrastructure.

• DNS Hijacking

  An attack that redirects DNS resolution to attacker-controlled answers by modifying client settings, router configurations, resolver responses, or authoritative DNS records.

• DNS Spoofing

  An attack that injects falsified DNS responses to redirect victims from a legitimate domain to an attacker-controlled IP address.

• DNS Cache Poisoning

  An attack that inserts forged records into a DNS resolver's cache so subsequent queries return attacker-chosen addresses until the TTL expires.

• ARP Spoofing

  A local-network attack that sends forged ARP messages to bind the attacker's MAC address to another host's IP, redirecting traffic through the attacker.

• IP Spoofing

  Forging the source IP address of network packets to impersonate another host, bypass filters, or amplify denial-of-service attacks.

• MAC Spoofing

  Changing a network interface's hardware MAC address to impersonate another device, bypass MAC-based access controls, or evade tracking.

• Email Spoofing

  Forging email headers so a message appears to come from a trusted sender, typically to enable phishing, fraud, or malware delivery.

• Business Email Compromise

  A targeted fraud in which an attacker impersonates or takes over a corporate mailbox to trick an employee into wiring money, changing payment details, or sending sensitive data.

• CEO Fraud

  A subtype of business email compromise in which an attacker impersonates a senior executive to pressure an employee into performing an unauthorised wire transfer or sensitive action.

• Romance Scam

  A long-running social-engineering fraud in which an attacker builds a fake romantic relationship with a victim and then exploits that trust to extract money, gifts, or sensitive information.

• Tech Support Scam

  A fraud in which attackers pose as technical support agents from a well-known vendor to convince victims to install remote-access tools, hand over credentials, or pay for fake services.

• Invoice Fraud

  A fraud in which attackers submit fake invoices, or alter genuine ones, so that payment is routed to attacker-controlled bank accounts.

• Credential Stuffing

  An automated attack that replays large lists of username/password pairs leaked from one service against other services, exploiting password reuse to take over accounts.

• Brute Force Attack

  An attack that systematically tries every possible value — typically passwords, PINs, or keys — until the correct one is found.

• Password Spraying

  A low-and-slow attack that tries a small set of common passwords against many user accounts, staying under lockout and rate-limit thresholds.

• Dictionary Attack

  A targeted password-guessing attack that tries entries from a precompiled list of likely words, leaked passwords, and rule-mutated variations.

• Rainbow Table Attack

  A precomputation attack that uses chains of hash and reduction functions stored in a compact table to invert unsalted password hashes much faster than brute force.

• Replay Attack

  An attack that captures legitimate network traffic — typically authentication tokens or transactions — and retransmits it later to impersonate the original sender.

• Relay Attack

  An attack that forwards an authentication exchange in real time between two parties, so the attacker is authenticated without ever knowing the credentials.

• Evil Twin Attack

  A Wi-Fi attack in which an adversary stands up a rogue access point that mimics a legitimate SSID, so victims connect to it and expose traffic or credentials.

• Rogue Access Point

  An unauthorised wireless access point connected to a network, either installed maliciously by an attacker or naively by an employee, that bypasses network security controls.

• Wi-Fi Pineapple

  A commercial wireless auditing platform from Hak5 that automates rogue access point, evil-twin, and man-in-the-middle attacks, widely used in red-team engagements.

• Bluejacking

  A largely nuisance-level Bluetooth attack in which an attacker sends unsolicited messages or contacts to nearby discoverable Bluetooth devices.

• Bluesnarfing

  An attack that exploits Bluetooth vulnerabilities to read or copy data — contacts, messages, calendar entries, files — from a nearby device without the owner's consent.

• Bluebugging

  A Bluetooth attack that gains hidden, command-level control of a victim device — beyond passive data theft — to place calls, read messages, or relay audio.

• Juice Jacking

  An attack in which a public or malicious USB charging port is used to install malware or exfiltrate data from a phone that plugs in, by abusing the data lines of the USB cable.

• Shoulder Surfing

  Observing someone's screen, keyboard, or PIN pad over their shoulder — directly or via cameras — to steal credentials, codes, or sensitive information.

• Dumpster Diving

  Searching through an organisation's or person's discarded materials — paper, removable media, hardware — to recover sensitive information.

• Piggybacking

  Unauthorized physical or logical access gained when an authorized person knowingly allows an attacker to follow them past an access control.

• Tailgating

  A physical intrusion technique where an attacker slips through an access control by closely following an authorized person without their consent or awareness.

• Social Engineering

  The psychological manipulation of people into performing actions or disclosing confidential information that benefits an attacker.

• Baiting

  A social-engineering attack that lures victims with an enticing physical or digital object designed to trigger malware execution or credential theft.

• Pretexting

  A social-engineering technique in which an attacker invents a believable scenario or identity to manipulate a target into disclosing information or performing an action.

• Quid Pro Quo Attack

  A social-engineering attack in which the attacker offers a service or benefit in exchange for information or access from the victim.

• Supply Chain Attack

  An attack that compromises a trusted third-party software, hardware, or service provider in order to reach its downstream customers.

• Watering Hole Attack

  A targeted attack that compromises a website frequently visited by a specific group of users in order to infect them when they browse it.

• Drive-by Download

  An attack in which malware is silently installed on a victim's device simply by visiting a compromised or malicious website.

• Malvertising

  The use of online advertising networks to distribute malware, exploits, or scams via legitimate-looking ads served on trusted websites.

• Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)

  A web vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious scripts into pages viewed by other users, executing in the victim's browser under the site's origin.

• Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

  A web attack that forces an authenticated user's browser to send unwanted requests to a vulnerable site, causing state-changing actions without consent.

• Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

  A web vulnerability that allows an attacker to coerce a server into making HTTP or other network requests on their behalf, often against internal systems.

• SQL Injection

  An attack that inserts attacker-controlled SQL fragments into queries built from untrusted input, allowing data theft, modification, or full database compromise.

• NoSQL Injection

  An injection attack against document, key-value or graph databases where attacker-controlled operators or JavaScript are smuggled into query objects.

• Command Injection

  Command Injection — definition coming soon.

• LDAP Injection

  LDAP Injection — definition coming soon.

• XML Injection

  XML Injection — definition coming soon.

• XXE Attack

  XXE Attack — definition coming soon.

• Server-Side Template Injection

  Server-Side Template Injection — definition coming soon.

• CSV Injection

  CSV Injection — definition coming soon.

• Directory Traversal

  Directory Traversal — definition coming soon.

• Local File Inclusion

  Local File Inclusion — definition coming soon.

• Remote File Inclusion

  Remote File Inclusion — definition coming soon.

• Insecure File Upload

  Insecure File Upload — definition coming soon.

• Open Redirect

  Open Redirect — definition coming soon.

• Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)

  Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) — definition coming soon.