Security fundamentals
Security is a topic that can feel overwhelming, particularly as you start to dig deeper into the tech stack. In this chapter, we’ll explore the most important topics relating to the certification exam. You can think of this as a simplified introduction, touching on different attack vectors, approaches to compromising systems, and the associated defense strategies.
At a very high level, there are two types of attacks: social engineering and technical engineering. Social engineering refers to the exploitation of humans in order to obtain information that will help compromise a system or obtain sensitive information. This is a very common attack vector and is often connected to phishing. Phishing is when an attacker sends malicious emails, for example, to a set of legitimate users in the hopes that they will be compromised. This can be a fake landing page asking them to sign into a website, which then captures their login credentials for accessing systems...
