Kevin Beaver

To cyber-protect your personal and business data, make sure everyone at home and at work recognizes that they are a target.People who believe that hackers want to breach their computers and phones and that cyber criminals want to steal their data act differently than people who do not understand the true nature of the threat.

Websites and applications are notorious for taking practically any type of input, mistakenly assuming that it’s valid, and processing it further. Not validating input is one of the greatest mistakes that web developers can make and one of the finest tools in a hackers toolkit.Several attacks that insert malformed data — often, too much at one time — can be run against a website or application, which can confuse the system and make it divulge too much information to the hacker.

Hackers use a variety of means to gain passwords. One of the most common ways for hackers to get access to your passwords is through social engineering, but they don’t stop there. Check out the following tools and vulnerabilities hackers exploit to grab your password. Keystroke logging One of the best techniques for capturing passwords is remote keystroke logging — the use of software or hardware to record keystrokes as they’re typed.

Although it’s not usually top of mind, people send a ton of good info via email that a hacker can use. Knowing this, you will want to ensure that your email systems are probably warded against hackers. The following countermeasures help keep messages as secure as possible to avoid an email hack. Software solutions that combat email hacking The right software can neutralize many threats against your email system: Use antimalware software on the email server — better, the email gateway — to prevent malware from reaching email clients.

Database systems — such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle — have lurked behind the scenes, but their value, security vulnerabilities and ability to be hacked have finally come to the forefront. Yes, even the mighty Oracle, which was once claimed to be unhackable, is as susceptible to exploits and hacks as its competition.

Hackers often use information that is public to target organizations. The amount of public information you can gather about an organization’s business and information systems from the internet is staggering. To see for yourself how hackers utilize public information to launch an attack, use the techniques outlined below to gather information about your own organization.

Every system you have in place can be subject to hacking. This includes email hacking, such as email bombs. Email bombs attack by creating denial of service (DoS) conditions against your email software and even your network and Internet connections by taking up a large amount of bandwidth and sometimes requiring large amounts of storage space.