McAfee Labs: Security 101: Attack Vectors Take Advantage of User Interaction

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February 8, 2012
by Francisca Moreno

Welcome back to Security 101. Our New Year's recess is over, and it's time to offer another lesson.

So far we have discussed vulnerabilities and some types of low-interaction attack vectors. In this lesson we shall continue with attack vectors that require medium or high levels of user interaction to succeed.

These attack vectors are more dangerous because their success relies on the victims, which means that they can work in multiple “buildings” in parallel. (Recall our analogy of comparing a system to a building.) An attacker who uses these vectors also has an advantage that does not depend on technology: the human factor. Humans are curious by nature and, even when we don’t care to admit it, gullible. Almost anyone, no matter how cautious, can be tricked into being a victim of an attack or helping an attacker.

But we’ll delve into the topic of social engineering another time. For now we’ll focus on the vectors themselves. These vectors may require as much work from attackers as the low-interaction ones. Most of the time goes into assembling a malicious website or something similar.

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