When a website goes down, it can be a big deal. But how do hackers bring down sites?
, an organization working to improve software security. These attacks are popular in part because they're easy — or at least easy for people who know how to do this sort of thing. They amount to sending more traffic to a website than it can handle, thereby causing it to crash. Distributed denial of service attacks are just bigger, slightly more sophisticated versions of DoS.
The OWASP top-ten list now has Broken Access Control in the number-one spot. In this scenario, attackers get into a website by exploiting the difficulty programmers have in ensuring that the web application doesn't allow access to the wrong user. According to OWASP, once in, the attacker can do loads of damage, sometimes even take over site administration.All this may sound like a frantic arms race between software developers and the bad guys. But it's not exactly that, says Olson.
That's a problem for software developers and website owners. But fortunately for the rest of us, best practices are fairly easy to implement: keep your software up to date; use strong passwords or use a password manager; don't download software without paying for it. For most of us, our greatest security vulnerability is the same thing it was long before the computer age: naiveté. Those emails trying to get your login info? Olson calls this "technological con artistry." It's not really that different from the scams people have been running since the serpent tricked Eve into tasting the apple. We're just seeing the tech-era version now.
"The biggest thing that most people need to know about cybersecurity," says Olson, "is that chances are very good no one's going to target you. Most of us are not that interesting. Unless you're a really high-value target, no one's going to be spending a lot of resources on getting into, let's say, your personal bank account. Use a little common sense, and you should be fine.
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