Cyber-Attack

Abstract

Cyber end effect activities fall into the two categories of cyber-reconnaissance for intelligence gathering and cyber-attacks. The previously discussed activity of cyber exploitation is necessary in many cases to enable intelligence gathering and is always necessary for cyber-attacks. Some might argue that exploitation is not always needed to attack another system and that they could do things like denial-of-service attacks, and so much traffic the remote system cannot keep up and fails in some way. If we revisit our definition of exploitation though, and its purpose of manipulating the target system to cause behavior that benefits the attacker, we can see how attacks are in fact exploitation. If I am sending too much traffic for a routing system to handle and it fails over into an open state, allowing all traffic, or even if it just shuts down or stops processing traffic from other senders as well, then I have manipulated that system to behave in a way I wanted which means I exploited it.