Why do intrusions and attacks happen?

Attacks do not operate in a vacuum, and as such, attacks and intrusions can be broken down into three core areas, sometimes referred to as the intrusion triangle or crime triangle. In other words, certain conditions must exist before an attack can occur. These core areas are Motive, Means, and Opportunity.

We’ll look at what each of these in the following sections.

Motive

An attacker must have a reason to want to attack a network. These motives include exploration, data manipulation, and causing damage, destroying, or stealing data. Motives may also be more personal, including financial, retaliation, or revenge. Examples include a disgruntled employee who wants to do damage based on some grievance with the company managers or coworkers. Another would be a cybercrime group targeting a company or industry to extort money through ransomware or some other means. Still, another would be a script kiddie who stumbled upon the network and thought it might be interesting to see what they could get access to. More on script kiddies in the Types and profiles of attackers and defenders section.

For investigators, it is also important to differentiate between motives for criminal activity and the operational goals and objectives associated with the larger crime. As an example, compromising user accounts is not the goal of an attack; gaining access to the corporate network and stealing data is. The account compromise is simply an operational goal.

It may also be important to understand the intensity of an attack and the motives behind it. People who are desperate are more determined to achieve their goals. The employee who is in a bad financial situation may see accessing and stealing company funds as the only means to alleviate the situation. And with that, the higher the pressure, the more likely it is that the employee will not only commit the crime but take larger risks to meet that goal.

Means

Once an attacker has a motive, they need the means to perform the attack. Means refers to the technology plus an individual’s or group’s skills, knowledge, and available resources. By understanding these requirements to commit a given crime, plus the potential motivations, investigators can narrow down attribution to individuals or groups and eliminate others. Additionally, investigators need to be aware of technological innovations as potential means of committing cybercrimes in relation to the crime committed. By way of example, a nation-state actor in China would not have the means to access and sabotage an electrical plant in the United States physically. However, once the electrical plant installed IoT sensors and connected them to the internet, the means would be made available.

Opportunity

The third part, completing the triangle, is opportunity. Used in conjunction with motive and means, an opportunity is that moment or chance where the attack can be completed successfully. For an opportunity to be available, it means that various protective mechanisms were either ineffective or non-existent. This means that human, technological, or environmental factors were conducive to the crime being committed. For example, a power failure might cause locked doors to fail open for safety but allow criminals free access to all areas of the company. Or, unpatched servers exposed to the internet might be discovered during a scan, informing attackers what exploit(s) will be successful in accessing the core network. You can see a visual representation of the crime triangle in the following figure:

Figure 1.1 – Crime triangle

Of the three areas, the ethical hacker has the most control over opportunity. As a defender, you cannot eliminate motive as that comes from the personal desires of the attacker, whether they are acting as an individual or a group. You also cannot eliminate means as knowledge is readily available, and skills can be acquired. This leaves opportunity as the area from which the odds of defending against and preventing most attacks are the most successful.

Now that we have looked at why intrusions happen, let’s take a look at the different types of people that make up the cyber security landscape, from attacker to defender.