Active and passive attacks
In general, active attacks are when you perform an action, and usually, passive attacks are when you just listen.
Active attacks
In network security, active attacks include the following types of attacks:
- Masquerade and Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks
- Modification attacks
- DoS attacks
Let's discover how they work. We will examine both Linux- and Windows-based examples, just to keep it interesting.
Masquerade and MITM attacks
These types of attacks occur when one entity pretends to be something it is not. For instance, this can be done by faking a MAC address or IP address so that packets that are intended to go to other destinations are forwarded to us instead. Let's take a look at how ARP poisoning occurs:
Figure 6.1 – ARP poisoning
In the preceding screenshot, you can observe how the PC with a MAC address of 08:00:27:f8:40:f1 sends fake ARP responses – for instance, 10...
