🕵️‍♂️ The ABC of online attacks in 2018!

Cyber attacks began long before you started getting Hotmail emails from some Nigerian prince who wanted to lend you a million euros or dollars.

Following the Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Google scandal, the online community has grown more anxious about security and privacy.

Every day, well-known businesses and even smaller ones are attacked by hackers, and brands lose money, time and credibility as a result.

Vulnerability, exploit or malware? No, attacks are not all the same and they do not all work in the same way. Before we show you three common attacks, let us explain the differences.

A vulnerability is software or hardware that leaves the door open to possible attacks or intrusions. An exploit is the act of using that vulnerability to attack or break into a system or network.

One way to carry out these attacks is to develop malware, a term that covers every kind of malicious software. This includes viruses, worms, Trojan horses and spyware, among others. Let's look at three of the most common attacks of recent times.

A - Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)🕵️‍♂️

An APT is a series of systematic attacks on a defined target, usually a particular organisation that holds valuable data. This could be a bank, a government agency or even a large company. The hackers behind this kind of attack are usually highly skilled and extremely persistent in trying to gain access to the organisation's network.

These attackers also aim to go unnoticed for a long time, so they can steal as much data as possible. In the most extreme cases, this can amount to industrial espionage.

B - Botnet 🤖

A botnet is usually a large number of connected devices that are compromised after an attack. These devices end up fully controlled by bots, which are instructed to make them take part in specific DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, spam and other attacks.

C - Cryptocurrency attacks💸

Cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin rely heavily on the people who mine them and use their own systems to support the growing number of transactions. However, scaling up mining requires investment in computers and, in turn, electricity. So hackers found a solution to this problem: they started hijacking personal computers to mine bitcoins. These attacks are typically carried out by infecting computers, often without the user noticing, through downloads that look legitimate.