8 Most Common Hacking Techniques You Must Know

Using these hacking techniques, a hacker can know about your personal unauthorized information which you don’t want to reveal.

1. Phishing

Phishing attacks are the practice of sending fraudulent communications that appear to come from a reputable source. It is usually done through email. The goal is to steal sensitive data like credit card and login information, or to install malware on the victim’s machine. Phishing is a common type of cyber attack that everyone should learn about in order to protect themselves.

2. Viruses and Trojan

Viruses or Trojans are malicious software programs that get installed into the victim’s system and keep sending the victim’s data to the hacker. They can also lock your files, serve fraud advertisement, divert traffic, sniff your data, or spread on all the computers connected to your network.

3. Cookie theft

Cookie theft occurs when a third party copies unencrypted session data and uses it to impersonate the real user. Cookie theft most often occurs when a user accesses trusted sites over an unprotected or public Wi-Fi network. Although the username and password for a given site will be encrypted, the session data traveling back and forth (the cookie) is not.

4. Bait and Switch

Bait & Switch is a type of fraud that uses relatively trusted avenues – ads – to trick users into visiting malicious sites. These attacks often occur in the form of advertising space being sold by websites and purchased by shady companies. Once the rogue attackers purchase the ad space, they replace the ad with an innocuous link which could be later used to download malware or browser locking or to compromise targeted systems.

5. ClickJacking Attacks

Clickjacking, also known as a “UI redress attack”, is when an attacker uses multiple transparent or opaque layers to trick a user into clicking on a button or link on another page when they were intending to click on the top level page. Thus, the attacker is “hijacking” clicks meant for their page and routing them to another page, most likely owned by another application, domain, or both.

Using a similar technique, keystrokes can also be hijacked. With a carefully crafted combination of stylesheets, iframes, and text boxes, a user can be led to believe they are typing in the password to their email or bank account, but are instead typing into an invisible frame controlled by the attacker.

6. Fake WAP

The hacker makes use of software to dupe a wireless access point and once inside the network the hacker accesses all the required data. The Fake WAP is one of the easier hacks to achieve and one just needs a simple software and wireless network.

7. Keylogger

A keylogger, sometimes called a keystroke logger or keyboard capture, is a type of surveillance technology used to monitor and record each keystroke on a specific computer. Keylogger software is also available for use on smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone and Android devices.

8. Denial of Service (DoS\DDoS) Attacks

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a type of cyber attack in which a malicious actor aims to render a computer or other device unavailable to its intended users by interrupting the device’s normal functioning. DoS attacks typically function by overwhelming or flooding a targeted machine with requests until normal traffic is unable to be processed, resulting in denial-of-service to addition users. A DoS attack is characterized by using a single computer to launch the attack.

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a type of DoS attack that comes from many distributed sources, such as a botnet DDoS attack.