Attack and Attack Prevention Methods

Logic Bugs, Design Flaws, Code Injections

Code Injection is an attack leveraging inadequate memory checks: it overwrites parts of a specific process stack with harmful data.
Attackers can provide an input requested by a process, which will later be stored in a stack; however, unlike the usual inputs, their input has a return address corresponding to a stack address.
Because of the design flaw, attackers can put their own code within the stack. This code will be executed when the control moves toward the return address.

Sandboxing is a practice used for isolating programs for security and safe testing/analysis purposes.
It protects the environment surrounding the program, and, as such, is ubiquitously applied in software development and cybersecurity.

Operating system vulnerabilities refer to the weaknesses emerging from the operating system that attackers can take advantage of to undermine the system’s security, integrity, or functionality.
The sources of vulnerabilities vary from design errors to the lack of security features.
It is crucial to address it considering the potential ramifications, which can include minor disturbances, operation disruptions, and data breach.

OS Hardening enhances the security found in operating systems like Windows and Linux, making them less vulnerable to cyber attacks.
It involves the identification of operating system vulnerabilities, wherein identified vulnerabilities are addressed or minimized using special OS hardening measures.
Examples of OS Hardening techniques are firewall configuration, access control, and data encryption.

Spoofing is a network attack whereby the attacker pretends to be another device to nullify a network from functioning, steal data, spread malware, or circumvent access controls.
One example of an attack spoofing can allow is a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS Attack), wherein a targeted network will be swamped with a flood of user traffic.

Network encryption offers an effective way to maintain network data privacy and equip the network with anti-hacking protection.
Often times, network encryptors are a physical and discrete device, completely separate from other components to integrate tamper resistance and detection mechanisms. This also makes it convenient to change when the network evolves and its requirements changes.

Hardware security refers to things involving the protection of hardware from attacks. It is study is relatively new field to be studied since, for a long time, people have assumed that hardware is invulnerable against attacks.
The reports on hardware security vulnerabilities in the past thirty years have gave rise to its importance, especially because the amount of security concerns have been increasing.
One form of attack is the malicious modification of Integrated Circuits (ICs), also known as Hardware Trojan attacks.

One measure to safeguard a system from a hardware-based attack is through full disk encryption, wherein the hard drive needed to boot a computer has all its data encrypted.
This ensures that the computer’s data is only accessible when a successful authentication occurs.