An attacker might try to access sensitive information through a direct attack, indirect attack or tracking. A wide variety of inference channels have been discovered in databases. One way of inference is querying the database based on sensitive information.
When two values taken together are classified at a higher level than one of every value involved, this becomes a data association. When a set of information is classified at a higher level than the individual level of data, it is a clear case of data aggregation.
In basic terms, inference is a data mining technique used to find information hidden from normal users. An inference attack may endanger the integrity of an entire database. The more complex the database is, the greater the security implemented in association with it should be.
The more overfitted a machine learning model is, the easier it will be for an adversary to stage membership inference attacks against it. Therefore, a machine model that generalizes well on unseen examples is also more secure ...
But in the case of models that work on tabular data such as financial and health information, a well-designed attack might be able to extract sensitive information, such as associations between patients and diseases or financial records of target people.
The researchers found that this attack was successful on many different machine learning services and architectures. Their findings show that a well-trained attack model can also tell the difference between training dataset members and non-members that receive a high confidence score from the target machine learning model.
Match the general attack strategy on the left with the appropriate description on the right. (Each attack strategy may be used once, more than once, or not all.)
Match the general defense methodology on the left with the appropriate description on the right. (Each methodology may be used once, more than once, or not all.)
The hacker seeks to find out as much information as possible about the victim. This first step is considered a passive information gathering.
One key defense against the hacker is the practice of deny all. The practice of the deny all rule can help reduce the effectiveness of the hacker’s activities at this step. Deny all means that all ports and applications are turned off, and only the minimum number of applications and services are turned on that are needed to accomplish the organization’s goals.
Access could be gained by finding a vulnerability in the web server’s software.
Scanning is the active step of attempting to connect to systems to elicit a response. Enumeration is used to gather more in-depth information about the target, such as open shares and user account information. At this step in the methodology, the hacker is moving from passive information gathering to active information gathering.
If the hacker is still struggling for information, he can turn to what many consider the hacker’s most valuable reconnaissance tool, the Internet . That’s right; the Internet offers the hacker a multitude of possibilities for gathering information. Let’s start with the company website. The company website might have key employees listed, technologies used, job listings probably detailing software and hardware types used, and some sites even have databases with employee names and email addresses.
Good security policies are the number one defense against reconnaissance attacks. They are discussed in more detail in Chapter 13, "Social Engineering and Physical Security."
A denial of service (DoS) might be included in the preceding steps if the attacker has no success in gaining access to the targeted system or network.
Gathering information is the first step where a hacker tries to get information about the target.
There are various tools, techniques, and websites, including public sources such as Whois, nslookup that can help hackers gather information.
Information Gathering is the act of gathering different kinds of information against the targeted victim or system. It is the first step or the beginning stage of Ethical Hacking, where the penetration testers or hackers (both black hat or white hat) performed this stage; this is a necessary and crucial step to be performed.