You must have noticed old company documents being thrown into dustbins as garbage. These documents might contain sensitive information such as Names, Phone Numbers, Account Numbers, Social Security Numbers, Addresses, etc. Many companies still use carbon paper in their fax machines and once the roll is over, its carbon goes into dustbin which may have traces of sensitive data. Although it sounds improbable, but attackers can easily retrieve information from the company dumpsters by pilfering through the garbage.

Example 2

An attacker may befriend a company personnel and establish good relationship with him over a period of time. This relationship can be established online through social networks, chatting rooms, or offline at a coffee table, in a playground, or through any other means. The attacker takes the office personnel in confidence and finally digs out the required sensitive information without giving a clue.

Example 3

A social engineer may pretend to be an employee or a valid user or an VIP by faking an identification card or simply by convincing employees of his position in the company. Such an attacker can gain physical access to restricted areas, thus providing further opportunities for attacks.

Example 4

It happens in most of the cases that an attacker might be around you and can do shoulder surfing while you are typing sensitive information like user ID and password, account PIN, etc.

Phishing Attack

A phishing attack is a computer-based social engineering, where an attacker crafts an email that appears legitimate. Such emails have the same look and feel as those received from the original site, but they might contain links to fake websites. If you are not smart enough, then you will type your user ID and password and will try to login which will result in failure and by that time, the attacker will have your ID and password to attack your original account.

Quick Fix

You should enforce a good security policy in your organization and conduct required trainings to make all the employees aware of the possible Social Engineering attacks and their consequences.
Document shredding should be a mandatory activity in your company.
Make double sure that any links that you receive in your email is coming from authentic sources and that they point to correct websites. Otherwise you might end up as a victim of Phishing.
Be professional and never share your ID and password with anybody else in any case.

Ethical Hacking – Cross-Site Scripting

Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a code injection attack that allows an attacker to execute malicious JavaScript in another user’s browser.

The attacker does not directly target his victim. Instead, he exploits a vulnerability in a website that the victim visits, in order to get the website to deliver the malicious JavaScript for him. To the victim’s browser, the malicious JavaScript appears to be a legitimate part of the website, and the website has thus acted as an unintentional accomplice to the attacker. These attacks can be carried out using HTML, JavaScript, VBScript, ActiveX, Flash, but the most used XSS is malicious JavaScript.

These attacks also can gather data from account hijacking, changing of user settings, cookie theft/poisoning, or false advertising and create DoS attacks.

Example

Let’s take an example to understand how it works. We have a vulnerable webpage that we got by the metasploitable machine. Now we will test the field that is highlighted in red arrow for XSS.

First of all, we make a simple alert script

<script> 
   alert(‘I am Vulnerable’) 
</script>

It will produce the following output −

Types of XSS Attacks

XSS attacks are often divided into three types −

Persistent XSS, where the malicious string originates from the website’s database.
Reflected XSS, where the malicious string originates from the victim’s request.
DOM-based XSS, where the vulnerability is in the client-side code rather than the server-side code.

Generally, cross-site scripting is found by vulnerability scanners so that you don’t have to do all the manual job by putting a JavaScript on it like

<script> 
   alert('XSS')
</script>

Burp Suite and acunetix are considered as the best vulnerability scanners.

Quick Tip

To prevent XSS attacks, keep the following points in mind −

Check and validate all the form fields like hidden forms, headers, cookies, query strings.
Implement a stringent security policy. Set character limitation in the input fields.

So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Concept of Social Engineering Attacks and Cross-Site Scripting’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Cyber Security. If you wish to learn Ethical Hacking and build a career in Cyber Security domain, then check out our interactive, Certified Ethical Hacker Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

https://www.tecklearn.com/course/certified-ethical-hacker-training/

Certified Ethical Hacker Training

About the Course

Tecklearn’s CEH certification training course provides you the hands-on training required to master the techniques hackers use to penetrate network systems and fortify your system against it. In this training, you will master how to identify security vulnerabilities by inspecting network infrastructures and defend the malicious hacker with essential tools and techniques, advanced network packet analysis and system penetration testing techniques to build your network security skill-set and prevent hackers. We will train you on the advanced step-by-step methodologies that hackers actually use such as writing virus codes and reverse engineering so you can better protect corporate infrastructure from data breaches.

Why Should you take Certified Ethical Hacker Training?

The average salary for a Cybersecurity Specialist is $110,881 per year in the United States and INR 900,000 per year in India – Indeed.com
Global Cybersecurity industry is estimated to cross US$ 220 billion by 2021.
Today cyber security is one of the most important aspects for any organization. In today’s digitally-driven world every organization needs professionals who can keep the hackers at bay. Hence the salaries for certified ethical hackers are among the best in the industry.

What you will Learn in this Course?

Introduction to Ethical hacking

Scope of ethical hacking
Enterprise information security architecture
Introduction and PCI Data Security Standard Overview
Role of Security and Penetration Testers
Vulnerability assessment
Various cyber security laws
Penetration testing

Various aspects of Information Security

Information security attacks
OS attacks
Application level attacks
Phases and Concepts of Hacking
Information Security Law and Standards

System Hacking

What is System Hacking
Goals of System Hacking
Understanding the certified ethical hacker methodology
About Kali Linux
Hands On

Technology Standards

Introduction to F5 Technology and Terms
POS (Point of Sale ) , mPoS
What is GLBA Compliance
OWASP
Site monitoring Tools
Introduction to PCI DSS Standard

Semantics and Introduction to Footprinting

What is Semantics
Fuzzy Logic
Footprinting

Threats

Types of Threats
Threats against the Application
Threat modelling
Hands on

Threat modelling

Threat modelling with STRIDE model
Ways to Find Security Issues
Penetration Testing Tools
Modelling Models – Whiteboard Diagrams, Brainstorming, Structured Diagrams etc.
Trust Boundaries
Threat Trees
DREAD Model

Example of Attack

Vulnerability Scanning Tools

OpenVAS
Wapiti
Burp Suite Community
Metasploit

Threat Modelling with Different models

Various Threat Models
PASTA Model in Depth

Advanced concepts like network packet analysis

Network scanning
How to scan the network, overview of scanning
WireShark
Sniffing attacks
File Signature

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section and we will get back to you.

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