Watering Hole or Straight at the Target?

About this interactive

What you are doing: deciding whether each attack is a watering hole. The lesson’s analogy: in a desert, a predator does not wander looking for prey; it waits at the watering hole every animal has to visit. A watering hole attack compromises an outside website that a specific group frequents (the lesson’s example is the website a company’s robotics program uses), so the next time those people visit, they pick up the malware and carry it into their organization. Straight at the target: the attacker goes after the organization itself, its own servers, its own website, its own staff’s inboxes or phones or doors. How to use it: ask whose site or system was compromised. An outside site the target’s people visit is a watering hole.

What you'll learn

Tell a watering hole attack, which compromises an outside website the target’s people already visit, from an attack aimed straight at the target’s own systems or staff

Aligned to

CompTIA Security+

2.2 Explain common threat vectors and attack surfaces.

Key terms

Watering Hole Attack: An attack where an adversary compromises a third-party website frequently visited by members of a target organization in order to infect those users and gain indirect access to the organization.
Threat Actor: An individual or group responsible for a security incident or attack.
Malware: Software specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a system.
Exploit: A piece of software or technique that takes advantage of a vulnerability to gain unauthorized access or cause harm.

Topics

Watering Hole Attack Interactive Streak Sort

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