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JA2. Cybersecurity Attacks and Countermeasures

  • Describe what was the most interesting topic you learned about in this unit. Think about reasons why you noticed this topic, your impression, your plans for further exploration of that topic.
  • Describe a cyberattack experience that happened to you, someone you know, or a business you are familiar with. Describe the type of cybersecurity issue, the way it was discovered, and steps taken to recover and/or prevent this cybersecurity issue from happening again.

Solution

Task 1

The written assignment instructed students to learn about the QR codes and cyber-crimes related to QR codes. The topic caught my attention as I understand it wrong all my life; My previous view about how QR codes work, that there is a global QR database that stores all QR codes and their corresponding data; when a QR is created the database will store the data and generate a QR code, and when a user scans a QR code, the App will send the QR code to the database and the database will return the data.

I was wrong, and I learned that QR codes are just images that contain data, with encrypted data on them; Mobile apps scan those QR codes and decode the data, the data can be encoded according to a few types like URL, text, phone number, etc. The data is not sent to any database, but decoded locally and the phone OS responds to each type of data accordingly (Schulfer, 2020).

My impression that the actual way how QR work is more risk prune than my previous view; and people should take extra care before scanning any QR codes, as anyone ca generate any QR code and encode malicious data in it.

I plan to learn more about logging in with QR codes as my banks asks me to scan a QR codes to login to my account on my laptop, and I am not sure how it works, and if it is secure or not.

Task 2

I know a friend who’s Instagram account was hacked; the attack started by an email from the attacker that has Instagram logo in it, the attacker claimed that he needs to do some maintenance on the account and they need to prove my friend’s identity, and here is the scenario:

  • The attacker claimed that he is from Instagram and that he will send a verification code to the victim’s email, and the victim should send it back to him to prove his identity.
  • In fact, the attacker tried to login to the victim’s account and Instagram sent a legitimate verification code to the victim’s email, but when the victim sent the code, the attacker successfully logged in to the victim’s account.
  • The first thing the attacker did was changing the email address, and then terminated all sessions, so the victim got kicked out from the App, and he couldn’t login again.
  • The attacker later contacted the victim and asked for money to give him back his account, but the victim refused to pay, and he contacted Instagram support team.
  • Instagram is a very big company with 100s of millions of users, so getting the right support was hard, and the victim accepted his fate and created a new account.

The above scenario was a pure manipulative social engineering, the attacker did not do any technical attacks, but manipulated the victim to give him the information he needs to hack his account. I was helping the victim during the incident and it was great lesson for both us; here is what we learned from this incident and how we can prevent it from happening again:

  • Users should learn how to differentiate between legitimate and fake emails, even if the email uses the same logo and colors of the company, the victim should have inspected the email further and he will probably notice that the email is fake.
  • It is important for users to understand that companies generate verification codes and send them to users, but they never ask for the code back, so the victim should have noticed that the email is fake.
  • Two-factor authentication is a great way to prevent such attacks.
  • Consider that the support team will not be able to help you at difficult times, thus, extra caution is needed before doing any action.

References