Identifying and Understanding

As we mentioned, attacks can be placed into one of a few categories. Attacks can
lead to anything from leaving your applications or systems without the ability to
function, to giving a remote attacker complete control of your systems to do
whatever he pleases.We discuss severity of attacks later in this chapter, placing
them on a line of severity. Let’s first look at the different types of external attacks
and discuss them.
In this section, we examine seven categorized attack types.These seven attack
types are the general criteria used to classify security issues:
■ Denial of service
■ Information leakage
■ Regular file access
■ Misinformation
■ Special file/database access
■ Remote arbitrary code execution
■ Elevation of privileges