It’s one thing to learn about protecting your website from different attacks, it’s another to know about how these hackers can infiltrate your website. In this article, we’ll be talking about just that, the different techniques cyber criminals used to hack into your website.
So let’s go through the most popular methods:
1. Denial of Service Attacks
DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks, is a mode of attack that involves making services unavailable, to put it simply, it involves crashing servers.
Hackers essentially use bots to either crash or interrupt a server. The purpose of these bots is to send continuous requests to the server. The bots will continue to do this until the server is unable to process all the requests resulting in it crashing. The worst thing about these kinds of attacks is that it generally doesn’t take that many requests to crash a server, so a hacker can shut a server down in a relatively short period of time.
2. Cookie Theft
Cookie theft is another attack type that hackers use to steal sensitive data from unsuspecting users.
A cookie is a small file that is stored by your web browser. This file is used to store various information about you, such as passwords, user credentials, browsing history and much more. These files, in most cases are stored as plain text, this means hackers are able to steal these cookies, along with the data on them, through the use of add-ons.
Once the computer hacker is able to obtain this data, they can use it to impersonate you while online.
3. Keylogger Injection
A keylogger is essentially a small piece of code that can be very dangerous and malicious at the end of the day. The purpose of this code is to record your key strokes, capture all the key presses you make on your keyboard, and to send this data back to the hacker. These hackers can also implement a little malicious script into it, which will turn your system into a cryptocurrency miner.
If the hacker is able to succeed in obtaining your key stroke data, then you’re looking at the theft of things such as admin credentials, which can allow hackers to gain access to your website or online accounts.
4. DNS Spoofing
DNS spoofing, which is also known as DNS cache poisoning, is another technique, specifically a web hacking technique that a lot of black hatters use.
This mode of attack is capable of injecting malicious domain system data into your DNS resolver cache, which will allow the hacker to redirect your traffic from legitimate websites to their forged sites. These forged websites could have anything on them, all of which is designed to collect your confidential data and send it back to the hacker.
The worst thing about these kinds of attacks is that they are capable of replicating themselves across many DNS servers, poisoning many systems and websites.
5. Non-targeted Site Hack
In the vast majority of cases, hackers do not target any specific site, they like to cast a large net and see what they find.
For this reason, it’s very easy to fall prey to a non-targeted attack. All you need to do is overlook something, such as a template, CMS or plugin vulnerability. Hackers will use any vulnerability they can find, to gain access to your site and make you their victim.
Hackers are able to search the internet and find websites with the kinds of weaknesses that they look to exploit. There is a Google’s Hacking Database that they like to use to spot vulnerable websites that have some of these same attributes. For example, it’s possible for a hacker to locate indexed sites that have a specific vulnerable plugin installed or a website that may have a hidden category in it.
6. UI Redress
This is a technique that has a lot of similarities with phishing. The main difference being that a hacker may create a fake hidden interface. One the end user clicks on a specific button, with the intentions of proceeding to another page, they may find themselves on an unfamiliar website, which could contain any kind of content.
7. Social Engineering
Social engineering is undoubtedly one of the most popular hacking methods deployed by hackers, as it entails using a company’s own staff to gain access to a system or entire network.
A hacker will look to trick an end user into divulging confidential data, which can be used to exploit the very network they are on. They do this, by using tried and tested psychological techniques.
For example, a company employee may receive a phone call from an individual claiming to be a member of a newly created tech department team. From there, they’ll proceed to ask very sensitive information, such as login usernames and passwords, claiming that they need it, in order to provide an update to their system. The employee hands over this data without knowing that they are giving it to a hacker, this in turn, leads to the company being compromised.
8. Brute Force Attack
Bruce force attacks is another fairly common technique that is used by hackers to gain unauthorized access to a website.
It works through the use of different hacking tools that attempt to guess the password of a specific website in order to gain unauthorized access to it. Even with all the information about the dangers of cybercriminals and computer hackers, so many people opt to create simple, predictable passwords for their online accounts.
The evidence of this is shown in the number of hacking tools designed specifically at guessing usernames and passwords.
Once a hacker gains access to an account, they can now start impersonating them.
9. Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
Cross Site Scripting or XSS as it’s also know, is another hacking method that is very popular amongst website hackers.
This method entails a hacker inserting client side code, usually JavaScript code into a web page that contains links. Once the end user clicks on one of these links, the JavaScript is started, which results in the end users account being completely taken over, another term for this is session hijacking.
This method of attack is most common on web forums and social media sites where users are not required to log in to view the site.
