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Common Attacks

Common cyberattacks such as denial of service, eavesdropping, spoofing, and adversary-in-the-middle attacks each exploit one or more vulnerabilities, and understanding their relationships is foundational to cybersecurity defense.

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About this video

Attacks and vulnerabilities are deeply connected, but their relationship takes several forms. A single vulnerability may be exploited by many different attacks, and a single attack may depend on multiple vulnerabilities at once — so understanding this many-to-many dynamic is essential before examining specific attack types in depth. Four of the most commonly encountered attack categories are denial of service, eavesdropping, spoofing, and adversary-in-the-middle, each of which represents a distinct method of compromising systems, communications, or availability. A denial of service attack disrupts access to a server or service, preventing legitimate users from reaching the resources they need. Eavesdropping means intercepting network traffic or communications between systems — the digital equivalent of listening in on a private conversation. Spoofing involves impersonating a trusted device, server, or network resource in order to deceive other systems or users. An adversary-in-the-middle attack positions a threat actor between two communicating parties, silently relaying and potentially manipulating traffic in both directions. These three attack types often work together: a threat actor can use spoofing to redirect traffic toward themselves, establishing an adversary-in-the-middle position, which then enables eavesdropping on the intercepted communications. For a structured approach to classifying attacks more broadly, the Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification system, known as CAPEC, defines recognized attack patterns across six domains: software, hardware, communication, supply chain, social engineering, and physical security. This framework provides an industry-standard taxonomy for identifying and categorizing threats, making it a useful reference point for security professionals analyzing attack surfaces and designing defenses.

What you'll learn

Distinguish between denial of service, eavesdropping, spoofing, and adversary-in-the-middle attacks and explain how these attack types can overlap or combine
Identify the CAPEC domains of attack used to classify common attack patterns in cybersecurity

What's covered

Attacks & Vulnerabilities Overview

Attack-Vulnerability Relationships
- One-to-One Mapping
- One Vulnerability Many Attacks
- One Attack Many Vulnerabilities
Common Attack Types
- Denial of Service
  - Disrupts user access
- Eavesdropping
  - Intercepts network traffic
- Spoofing
  - Impersonates devices
- Adversary in the Middle
  - Intercepts both endpoints
Combined Attack Example
- Spoofing enables AITM
- AITM enables eavesdropping
CAPEC Attack Domains
- Software & Hardware
- Communication & Supply Chain
- Social Engineering
- Physical Security

Key terms

Denial of Service: An attack that floods a system or network with traffic to make it unavailable to legitimate users.
Spoofing: An attack where an adversary impersonates a trusted entity by falsifying data such as an IP address or email address.
Man-in-the-Middle Attack: An attack where an adversary secretly intercepts and potentially alters communications between two parties.
Distributed Denial of Service: An attack that uses multiple systems to flood a target with traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users.
Eavesdropping: The unauthorized interception of network traffic or keystrokes to capture credentials as they are transmitted or entered.
Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification: CAPEC is a MITRE-maintained knowledge base that catalogs common cyber attack patterns with detailed descriptions of how adversaries exploit weaknesses, used to inform threat modeling and defensive security controls.

Topics

Cybersecurity Denial Of Service Eavesdropping Spoofing Adversary In The Middle Capec Attack Patterns

Transcript

The idea behind each one of these vulnerabilities is that somehow it would lead to some sort of an attack. Let's look at some common attacks just from an overall picture, and what they could look like.

What an attack does is it leverages vulnerabilities so that you can carry it out. For that reason, a lot of times a vulnerability is associated with an attack and they go by the same name. So this would be the case where we have like a one for one, where an attack leverages a vulnerability.

But there are different scenarios here, and that is, sometimes we have multiple attacks that leverage the same type of vulnerability. In this case we have one vulnerability, but there can be many different attacks that leverage that vulnerability. Likewise, we might have a certain type of attack that leverages multiple vulnerabilities. So in that case, we have one type of attack that's leveraging multiple vulnerabilities. Just realize we have several different scenarios here in the relationship between an attack and a vulnerability.

Some types of attacks

This certainly isn't an exhaustive list, but some of the types of attacks there are out there is a denial of service attack, an eavesdropping attack, a spoofing attack, and an adversary-in-the-middle attack.

Denial of service

A denial of service really says it in its name. First of all, the service side of it: we have a server right here that's providing services to the end user, many different services most likely, and these users are accessing those services. Well, a denial of service makes sure that those users can't access that service, and so they don't have access to it. This is really a disruptive type of an attack, where it really causes a lot of problems to those end users, or to whoever is running the service servers, or most likely both.

Eavesdropping

An eavesdropping attack is just a method of listening in. Eavesdropping could be even in person. You could eavesdrop on somebody else, listen in to somebody else's conversation. When it comes to cyber security, we're talking about eavesdropping onto network traffic, or eavesdropping on somebody's communication. Maybe it's between this user and this server right here.

Spoofing

Spoofing is this idea that you're pretending to be somebody else. So maybe this adversary is pretending to be this firewall, or pretending to be this server, or pretending to be a wireless access point. So spoofing is to pretend to be some other device.

Adversary in the middle

An adversary in the middle also has it all in its name. Middle means in between. So let's say we have a user that's connecting to the server right here, and this is the adversary. That is the adversary right there, and they are in the middle of this communication. So communication is going to this adversary and then to the server, and then it's going back to the adversary and then back to this machine. Any communication that normally would just go between this user and this machine is instead going through the adversary.

Now realize this type of an attack could be all of the same thing. This could be an adversary in the middle, this could be a spoofing attack, and this could be eavesdropping. What I mean by that is, let's say this user is connecting to the server. What's happening is this is going to be an adversary in the middle if it's going through this adversary right here, if that adversary is in the middle.

So what about the spoofing? One way to carry out an adversary in the middle attack is to spoof. From this user's perspective, this adversary is spoofing this machine right here, so that way, instead of sending traffic to the server, instead it will send traffic to this adversary. And vice versa, this adversary is going to be spoofing this machine right here according to this server, so this server thinks that it's sending it to this user but instead is sending it to the adversary. Therefore there is spoofing that's happening here to create an adversary in the middle, and they could be doing that to carry out an eavesdropping attack, to listen in on the conversation. So this attack that I explained right here is an adversary in the middle, a spoofing attack, and an eavesdropping attack.

Domains of attack

Now, if we were to categorize certain types of attacks, maybe the most official way that we could categorize attacks is right here, these domains of attack. The reason why I say this is, this is the CAPEC site. CAPEC stands for Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification. The idea behind it is that these are attack patterns, so we can recognize certain attack patterns. And so these are the domains of attack. What could be attacked? We've got software, hardware, communication, supply chain, social engineering, and physical security. So this would probably be one of the most official ways that we could classify different types of attacks.

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