Analyzing current trends

Over time, hackers have proven to cybersecurity experts that they can be persistent, more creative, and increasingly sophisticated with their attacks. They have learned how to adapt to changes in the IT landscape so that they can always be effective when they launch attacks. Even though there is no Moore’s law equivalent in the context of cyber attacks, it can be said that hacking techniques become more sophisticated each year.

Below, in the illustration, you will see an example of the anatomy of a cyber attack.

Figure 6.1: Anatomy of a cyber attack

In the last few years, there has been an observed trend in terms of the preferred attacks and modes of execution. These include extortion attacks, data manipulation attacks, IoT device attacks, backdoors, hacking everyday devices, hacking the cloud, phishing, exploiting a vulnerability in a system, and zero-day attacks. In this section, we will explain how these attacks and modes of execution...