One Flaw or an Exploit Chain?

About this interactive

What you are doing: deciding whether an attack used one flaw or a chain of them. A vulnerability is a thing: what makes a system vulnerable, like the rocket's stress fracture. Exploitation is the action of leveraging it. Sometimes one vulnerability is enough on its own: a database open to the internet with no password needs nothing else. Exploit chaining, or vulnerability chaining, is when an attacker uses several vulnerabilities together, none of which would be a big deal by itself. The lesson's rocket has a crack, a flawed outer shield and a loose bolt; any one is survivable, all three together are not. Real attacks such as ProxyShell chained several recorded CVEs to take over servers. How to use it: count what the attacker needed. If one weakness took them all the way, it is one flaw. If they needed one to get in and another to get further, it is a chain. A wrong answer resets your streak and shows the right bin; land five in a row to finish.

What you'll learn

Tell an attack that needs only one vulnerability from an exploit chain, where several vulnerabilities, none enough on its own, are used together to compromise a system

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

2.3 Explain various types of vulnerabilities.

Key terms

Exploit Chaining: The practice of combining multiple vulnerabilities and their corresponding exploits in sequence to compromise a system that would otherwise resist a single-vulnerability attack.
Vulnerability: A weakness in a system, application, or process that can be exploited by a threat actor.
Exploit: A piece of software or technique that takes advantage of a vulnerability to gain unauthorized access or cause harm.
Privilege Escalation: An attack that exploits vulnerabilities to gain higher-level access than originally authorized.

Topics

Exploit Chaining Vulnerability Exploit Privilege Escalation Interactive Streak Sort

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