Cybersecurity is something most people did not consider until lately that been attacks like the Colonial Pipeline on May 6, 2021. Cyberattacks on essential industries in our country have shown how vulnerable most companies are. Many companies are starting to invest in cybersecurity software and trained personnel. In this paper, we will talk about denial of service(DoS), phishing, and social engineering that are used in cyberattacks and are not going away soon.

            Denial of service(DoS) is one of the oldest types of attack because it has been a vulnerability in most operating systems (OS). One of these attacks is the PING of death or PING flooding that could create a memory overflow that would cause the OS to crash. Another method of DoS is using multiple computers infected with a virus or malware to attack a specific site.

            Most people have been victims of a phishing attack by opening a link in their email that leads them to a website that looks just like the real one, but the only purpose of this fake site is to log any login information the user put on it. "Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in digital communication." (Esolda et al., 2021, p. 1). Some of these attacks are now filtered by the email spam filter. Also, the modern web browser will warn the user if a phishing website is detected.

            According to the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) "social engineering is an attempt to trick someone into revealing information to attack systems or networks. Successful social engineering attacks depend on a target being manipulated or tricked into disclosing personal information." (Syafitri et al., 2022,p. 1). Since social engineering is manipulating a victim into giving information, training is the only way to prevent it. Social engineering is the most difficult attack to defend against since software is not required to accomplish it.

            DoS, phishing, and social engineering are only some of the many cyberattacks on computers and networks. Cybersecurity software, firewalls, and antivirus can help prevent cyberattacks. However, for most businesses training their users and maintaining a cyber security team that acts fast is the best answer to today's cyber attacks problems. 

References

ESOLDA, G., FERRO, L. S., MARRELLA, A., CATARCI, T., & COSTABILE, M. F. (2021). Human Factors in Phishing Attacks: A Systematic Literature Review. ACM Computing Surveys, 8, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3469886

Syafitri, W., Shukur, Z., Mokhtar, U. A., Sulaiman, R., & Ibrahim, M. A. (2022). Social Engineering Attacks Prevention: A Systematic Literature Review. IEEE Access, Access, IEEE, 10, 39325–39343. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3162594

Vahid, F., & Lysecky, S. (2019). Computing technology for all. zyBooks.