Security+ Cert Exam Objectives SYO-601

Phishing

fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data, by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.

Smishing

When someone tries to trick you into giving them your private information via a text or SMS message.

Vishing

Using social engineering over the telephone system to gain access to private personal and financial information for the purpose of financial reward

Spam

irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent to a large number of Internet users, for illegitimate advertising, and other activities such as phishing, and spreading malware

SPIM

Spam delivered through instant messaging (IM) instead of through e-mail messaging

Spear Phishing

the act of sending emails to specific and well-researched targets while pretending to be a trusted sender

Dumpster Diving

exploration of a system's trash bin for the purpose of finding details in order for a hacker to have a successful online assault.

Shoulder Surfing

When someone watches over your shoulder to nab valuable information as you key it into an electronic device.

Pharming

cyberattack intended to redirect a website's traffic to another, fake site.

Tailgating

Social engineering attempt by cyber threat actors in which they trick employees into helping them gain unauthorized access into the company premises.

Eliciting Information

Procedures or techniques involving interacting with and communicating with others that is designed to gather knowledge or inform

Whaling

Spear phishing that focuses on one specific high level executive or influencer

Prepending

Prepend is a word that means to attach content as a prefix. For example, a prepend command could be used in a scripting language that a programmer would enter into a certain function or code module. It would add certain characters of text to the beginning of some variable or object.

Identity Fraud

identity fraud is the use of stolen information such as making fake ID's and fake bank accounts

Invoice Scams

using fraudulent invoices to steal from a company

Credential Harvesting

the use of MITM attacks, DNS poisoning, phishing, etc. to amass large numbers of credentials (username / password combinations) for reuse.

Reconnaissance

- Information gathering about a target network

Hoax

Cyber hoax scams are attacks that exploit unsuspecting users to provide valuable information, such as login credentials or money.

Impersonation

typically involves an email that seems to come from a trusted source.

Watering hole attack

security exploit in which the attacker seeks to compromise a specific group of end users by infecting websites that members of the group are known to visit. The goal is to infect a targeted user's computer and gain access to the network at the target's place of employment.

Typo squatting

type of cybersquatting used by imposters that involve registering domains with intentionally misspelled names of popular web addresses to install malware on the user's system

Pretexting

the practice of presenting oneself as someone else in order to obtain private information.

Influence campaigns

Hybrid warfare

- Combining conventional warfare with cyberwarfare

Social Media Campaign

Planned, coordinated marketing efforts using one or more social media platforms.

Principles:

Authority: an attacker may try to appear to have a certain level authority.

Intimidation: may try to make the victim think that something terrible is going to happen if they don't comply with the attacker's wishes.

Consensus: An attacker may try to sway the mind of a victim using names they are familiar with, saying that such ones provided them information (they are fishing for) in the past and you should be able to do the same.

Scarcity: An attacker may try to set a time limit on a victim so that they can comply with their wishes by a certain deadline.

Familiarity: they make you familiar with them on the phone and make you want to do things for them.

Trust: The attacker in this case can claim to be a friend or close associate of someone you may know very well and that's trusted.

Urgency: When attackers want you to act and not think, they want you to do what they want as quickly as possible so that there's no time to spot all the red flags.

Malware

a program or file designed to be disruptive, invasive and harmful to your computer.

Ransomware

Software that encrypts programs and data until a ransom is paid to remove it.

Worms

Independent computer programs that copy themselves from one computer to other computers over a network

potentially unwanted program (PUP)

program that installs itself on a computer, typically without the user's informed consent

Fileless virus

Software that uses legitimate programs to infect a computer. It does not rely on files and leaves no footprint, making it challenging to detect and remove.

command and control

A computer controlled by an attacker or cybercriminal which is used to send commands to systems compromised by malware and receive stolen data from a target network

Bots

self-propagating malware that infects its host and connects back to a central server(s).

Cryptomalware

Malware to remain in place for as long as possible, quietly mining in the background.

logic bomb

A computer program or part of a program that lies dormant until it is triggered by a specific logical event.

Spyware

Type of malware that infects your PC or mobile device and gathers information about you, including the sites you visit, the things you download, your usernames and passwords, payment information, and the emails you send and receive.

Keyloggers

software that tracks or logs the keys struck on your keyboard, typically in a covert manner so that you don't know that your actions are being monitored.

Remote Access Trojan

type of malware that allows covert surveillance, a backdoor for administrative control and unfettered and unauthorized remote access to a victim's machine.

Rootkit

software program, typically malicious, that provides privileged, root-level (i.e., administrative) access to a computer while concealing its presence on that machine

Backdoor

refers to any method by which authorized and unauthorized users are able to get around normal security measures and gain high level user access (aka root access) on a computer system, network, or software application.

Password Attack

Any type of attack in which the attacker

attempts to obtain and make use of passwords illegitimately.

Spraying password attack

Dictionary password attack

An attack method that takes all the words from a dictionary file and attempts to log on by entering each dictionary entry as a password.

brute force password attack (offline and online)

an attempt to guess a password by attempting every possible combination of characters and numbers in it

Rainbow Tables

an attack on a password that uses a large pregenerated data set of hashes from nearly every possible password

Plaintext/unencrypted password attack

Malicious universal serial bus (USB) cable

Malicious flash drive

Card cloning

Skimming

Adversarial artificial intelligence (AI)

1. Tainted training for machine learning (ML)

2. Security of machine learning algorithms

Supply-chain attacks

Cloud-based vs. on-premises attacks

Cryptographic attacks

1. Birthday:

2. Collision:

3. Downgrade:

Privilege escalation

Cross-site scripting

Injections

Structured query language (SQL)

Dynamic link library

Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP)

Extensible markup language (XML)

Pointer/object dereference

Directory traversal

Buffer overflows

Race conditions(Time of check/time of use)

Error handling

Improper input handling

Replay attack (session replays)

Integer overflow

Request forgeries

1. Server-side

2. Cross-site

Application programming interface (API) attacks

Resource exhaustion

Memory leak

Secure sockets layer (SSL) stripping

Driver manipulation

Shimming

Refactoring

Pass the hash

Wireless Evil Twin

Rogue access point

Bluesnarfing

Bluejacking

Some users with Bluetooth-enabled mobiles use this technology to send anonymous text messages to strangers.

Disassociation

Jamming

Radio frequency identifier (RFID)

Near Field Communication (NFC)

A set of standards primarily for smartphones and smart cards that can be used to establish communication between devices in close proximity.

Initialization Vector (IV)

A 24-bit value used in WEP that changes each time a packet is encrypted.

On-path attack(Man-in-the-middle)

Layer 2 attacks

Address resolution protocol poisoning

Media access control flooding

MAC Cloning

Domain Name System (DNS)

A hierarchical system for naming resources on the Internet.

Domain jacking

DNS poisoning

Technique used by criminals to alter DNS records and drive users to fake sites, to committing phishing.

Universal resource locator redirection

Domain reputation

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

An attack that uses many computers to perform a DoS attack.

DDOS network

DDOS application