Despite of all the glorious advantages and the fantastic wonders of the cyber age, nations have to deal with the serious threats of cyberwarfare. Since 1998, Internet usage has been prevalent, which has opened …show more content…
According to Ian Karambelas, phishing is “an attempt to obtain user credentials, financial data, or other sensitive information by emulating a legitimate email communication.” But spear phishing is a far greater threat than the phishing email because it is “a type of targeted phishing in which an attacker first researches the target individual or company to increase their chance of success. Because this allows the attacker to appear more trustworthy as a legitimate business entity, users are less suspicious.” (Karambelas, 2016, pg. 1). Trend Micro’s APT research team believes that spear phishing is the most favored APT attack bait. The cost of opening a spear-phishing email can be enormous. For example, the email service provider Epsilon “fell prey to a spear-phishing attack that caused the organization to lose an estimated US $4 billion.” (Trend Micro, 2012, pg. …show more content…
A “Denial of service is conducted when a multitude of systems are bombarded with traffic, which chokes the targeted networks and renders them unavailable to users.” (Hoffman, 2013, pg. 1). According to Hoffman, one of the earliest cases of DDoS was reported in 1999 against the IRC server of the University of Minnesota, which left 227 systems affected and the university’s server was out of service for several days. The DDoS attack can be crippling and often results in major disruption of business services. These types of attacks can have a significant financial impact on an organization and have the potential to cause enormous damage. In 2000, some of the most well-known Web sites in the world suffered DDoS attacks. “Major traffic generators such as Yahoo!, eBay, CNN, Amazon.com and ZDNet suffered from assaults that paralyzed their systems and barred users from accessing their services for hours.” (Hoffman, 2013, pg.