It is evident that 2016, has been a year filled with all types of cybercrime. Ranging from DDoS attacks to malware, hacking to ransomware, and social engineering to skimming, a lot of havoc has been caused by select groups of individuals. But what were some of the top attack vectors exploited by criminals in 2016?

#4 DDOS ATTACKS ARE GROWING IN NUMBER

The recent attacks against DynDNS go to show how a major denial-of-service attack wave can cripple the Internet as we know it today. But DDoS attacks are becoming more common in general, although not all of them are on the same level as the October 21st attack. Overload or even crashing web servers with a multitude of requests is an effective way to gain glory in the hacker world.

It is rather easy to fight most DDoS attacks in most cases, such as filtering specific traffic types and regions. Moreover, DDoS mitigation is an absolute must for all of the great companies in the world right now. Unfortunately, even the best protection does not mean that hackers won’t find a way to disrupt services.

#3 MALWARE AND RANSOMWARE

Even though the media headlines have been filled with stories about malware and ransomware all year, they are not the big culprit in cyber attacks yet. Granted, the number of malware attacks is growing exponentially, and that trend will continue for some time. Protecting against these intrusions is a top priority, although human error is often to blame for a malware infection.


#2 APPLICATION-SPECIFIC ATTACKS

Albeit his term may sound foreign to a lot of people, application-specific attacks are a prime threat to Internet users. Hackers targeting specific applications is a cause for concern, as it allows them to capture all data packets flowing through that application. For example, a major attack against Skype would put all users’ communications at risk of being leaked. Close to one in five cyber attacks throughout 2016, relied on using application-specific attacks, which is quite a troublesome number.

#1 WEB APPLICATIONS ATTACKS

As most people may have noticed, web applications are becoming a very lucrative target for hackers. In fact, web application attacks have been around for quite some time now. SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and other types of attack are very common. One such attack recently allowed a white hat hacker to obtain sensitive information from UberCENTRAL.

Preventing web applications attacks has been a challenge for security researchers throughout the years. It is up to individual app developers to secure and maintain their code base at all times. Criminals and hackers are always one step ahead in this game, and it is of the utmost importance to even the playing field whenever possible.

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SOURCE: The Merkle