what is cyber security
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Cybersecurity, computer security or IT security is the protection of computer systems from theft of or damage to their hardware, software or electronic data, as well as from disruption or misdirection of the services they provide.
Cyber security includes controlling physical access to system hardware, as well as protecting against harm that may be done via network access, malicious data and code injection. Also, due to malpractice by operators, whether intentional or accidental, IT security personnel are susceptible to being tricked into deviating from secure procedures through various methods of social engineering.
The field is of growing importance due to increasing reliance on computer systems, the Internet and wireless networks such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and due to the growth of "smart" devices, including smartphones, televisions and the various tiny devices that constitute the Internet of Things. Professionals working in the cyber security field can be known by some of the following terms:
White hat hacker – also known as an "ethical hacker" or penetration tester. They are professional hackers that break into systems and use exploits to access target systems for reasons pertaining to prevention of crime or hardening the security of a target.
Black hat hacker – a criminal who breaks into systems and compromises security against the law.
Grey hat hacker – someone who conducts black hat hacks for white hat hacker reasons.
Vulnerabilities and attacks
Main article: Vulnerability (computing)
A vulnerability is a weakness in design, implementation, operation or internal control. Most of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered are documented in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database.
An exploitable vulnerability is one for which at least one working attack or "exploit" exists.[7] Vulnerabilities are often hunted or exploited with the aid of automated tools or manually using customized scripts.
To secure a computer system, it is important to understand the attacks that can be made against it, and these threats can typically be classified into one of these categories below:
Backdoor
A backdoor in a computer system, a cryptosystem or an algorithm, is any secret method of bypassing normal authentication or security controls. They may exist for a number of reasons, including by original design or from poor configuration. They may have been added by an authorized party to allow some legitimate access, or by an attacker for malicious reasons; but regardless of the motives for their existence, they create a vulnerability.
Denial-of-service attacks
Denial of service attacks (DoS) are designed to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.[8] Attackers can deny service to individual victims, such as by deliberately entering a wrong password enough consecutive times to cause the victims account to be locked, or they may overload the capabilities of a machine or network and block all users at once. While a network attack from a single IP address can be blocked by adding a new firewall rule, many forms of Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are possible, where the attack comes from a large number of points – and defending is much more difficult. Such attacks can originate from the zombie computers of a botnet, but a range of other techniques are possible including reflection and amplification attacks, where innocent systems are fooled into sending traffic to the victim.
Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_security
