Cybersecurity

Reema Thareja
  • ISBN: 9789377062897
  • 790 pages

Description

Cybersecurity is a comprehensive, classroom-ready introduction to how digital systems are attacked and how they are defended. Banking, healthcare, education, governance, and commerce now run on digital infrastructure, and cybercrime has stopped being an IT department problem. This book is written for the students and professionals who will have to deal with that.

The text is organized into fifteen chapters that move from foundational concepts to advanced and emerging areas. The opening chapters establish what cyber security is, then work through the taxonomy of active, passive, and hardware attacks; malware in all its forms; social engineering; and two full chapters on web application vulnerabilities, from SQL injection and XSS through to clickjacking, session hijacking, and business logic flaws.

From there the book turns to defense. It covers cybercrime techniques and the dark web, the CIA triad and risk management frameworks, access control and authentication, network defense mechanisms from firewalls to onion routing, and threat intelligence through the cyber kill chain, incident response, and honeypots. Three chapters then develop cryptography properly, from classical ciphers to DES, AES, RSA, and Diffie-Hellman, and on to TLS, IPsec, PGP, and email authentication.

The final chapters address cyber threat intelligence, including SIEM, the role of AI and machine learning, and digital, network, and mobile forensics, before closing on security in emerging technologies: blockchain, IoT, cloud, DevSecOps, and quantum cryptography. A full set of laboratory exercises follows the fifteen chapters, giving students hands-on practice in controlled environments. Chapter-wise PowerPoint decks and a solutions manual are available to adopting faculty.

About the Author

Reema Thareja is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, School of Open Learning, University of Delhi, with more than 21 years of teaching experience across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She has published over 40 research papers in reputed international journals and filed six patents, with an h-index of 14 and an i10-index of 21. She built Jruma, a computer science learning and quizzing app for Android and iOS, to make learning a fun-based activity.

 

She serves on the Board of Studies in Computer Science for P.B. Siddhartha College of Arts & Science, Vijayawada and Sri Durga Malleswara Siddhartha Mahila Kalasala, and on the Technical Advisory Board of Refactor Academy. She has spoken at FDPs, conferences, workshops, and webinars in India, the UAE, and the USA, including the Global Virtual Summit in New York in 2021 and an international conference in France in 2023. She has mentored student projects for California-based startups and recorded MOOCs for the School of Open Learning, University of Delhi.

Table of Contents

Preface v

About the Book vii

About the Author ix

Acknowledgments xi

Chapter 1 Introduction to Cyber Security 1

1.1 What Is Cybersecurity? 2

1.2 Major Cybersecurity Challenges 3

1.3 Components of Cybersecurity Systems 4

1.4 Common Sources of Cyber Threats 7

1.5 Different Types of Cybersecurity 8

1.6 Key Aspects of Cyber Security 14

1.7 The Evolution of the Cybersecurity Threat Landscape 16

1.8 Cybersecurity Trends 18

1.9 Essential Security Technologies 20

1.10 Cybersecurity Myths vs. Facts 22

End-of-chapter assessment 25

Chapter 2 Taxonomy of Attacks: Active, Passive, and Hardware Attacks 31

2.1 Active and Passive Attacks 32

2.2 Types of Active Attacks 35

2.3 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) 38

2.4 Passive Attack 46

2.5 Securing Hardware and Software 54

2.6 Hardware Threats 56

2.7 Types of Hardware Attacks 58

2.8 Best Practices for Securing Hardware: A Practical Guide 62

2.9 Cyber Criminals and Their Motives 64

End-of-chapter assessment 70

Chapter 3 Malware Attacks 75

3.1 What Is Malware? 76

3.2 Virus 77

3.3 Worms 83

3.4 Trojan Horse 87

3.5 Ransomware 90

3.6 Adware 92

3.7 Spyware 93

3.8 Keyloggers 96

3.9 Logic Bomb 103

3.10 Rootkits 105

3.11 Backdoor 106

3.12 How to Identify if a Device Is Infected with Malware? 109

3.13 How to Protect Against Malware 109

End-of-chapter assessment 111

Chapter 4 Social Engineering Attacks 117

4.1 Social Engineering 118

4.2 How Does Social Engineering Work? 119

4.3 Why It Works: Human Nature and Lack of Awareness 121

4.4 How to Prevent Social Engineering Attacks 124

4.5 Social Engineering Attack Techniques 126

End-of-chapter assessment 138

Chapter 5 Input-Based Vulnerabilities in Web Applications 145

5.1 What Is a Web Application? 146

5.2 SQL Injection 149

5.3 Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) 153

5.4 Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) 157

5.5 Directory Traversal Attack 160

5.6 Command Injection 162

5.7 File Inclusion Attacks 166

5.8 Web Shell Attacks 171

End-of-chapter assessment 175

Chapter 6 Advanced Exploitation and Logic Attacks in Web Security 181

6.1 Clickjacking 183

6.2 Session Hijacking 186

6.3 Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) Attack 191

6.4 Man-in-the-Browser (MitB) 197

6.5 HTTP Response Splitting Attack 199

6.6 Open Redirect Attack 201

6.7 Business Logic Vulnerabilities 206

6.8 Web Cache Poisoning 209

End-of-chapter assessment 212

Chapter 7 Cybercrime Techniques 219

7.1 Cybercrime 220

7.2 Types of Cybercrimes 221

7.3 Why Are Cybercrimes Increasing? 225

7.4 Impact of Cybercrime 225

7.5 Challenges of Cybercrime 227

7.6 Basic Prevention Measures 228

7.7 Cyberstalking 228

7.8 Cyberharassment 230

7.9 Cyberbullying 230

7.10 Dark Web 233

7.11 Mobile Security 239

7.12 IoT Security 243

7.13 Online Scams 248

7.14 Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (OCSEA) 252

7.15 Cyberwarfare 254

7.16 Cybercrime-as-a-Service (CaaS) 256

End-of-chapter assessment 261

Chapter 8 Core Concepts in Cybersecurity and Risk Management 267

8.1 The CIA Triad 269

8.2 Cybersecurity Risk Management: A Shared Responsibility 273

8.3 Cybersecurity Risk Management Plan 274

8.4 Risk Appetite and Risk Tolerance 277

8.5 Standards and Frameworks That Require a Cyber Risk Management Plan 279

8.6 Benefits of Cybersecurity Risk Management 283

8.7 Cyber Security Risk Management Best Practices 284

8.8 Common Challenges in Cybersecurity Risk Management 285

8.9 Access Control 286

8.10 Authentication 292

8.11 Authentication Protocols 298

8.12 Kerberos 307

End-of-chapter assessment 310

Chapter 9 Network Defense Mechanisms and Secure Communication 317

9.1 Antivirus Software 319

9.2 Firewall 327

9.3 Intrusion Detection System (IDS) 336

9.4 Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) 343

9.5 Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS) 346

9.6 Virtual Private Network (VPN) 347

9.7 Wireless Security 352

9.8 Onion Routing 358

End-of-chapter assessment 364

Chapter 10 Advanced Threat Intelligence and Security Planning 371

10.1 Kill Chain 373

10.2 Incident Response 376

10.3 Honeypots 381

10.4 Cybersecurity Plan 391

End-of-chapter assessment 401

Chapter 11 Cryptography 407

11.1 Cryptography 408

11.2 Types of Cryptography 410

11.3 Secure Communications 418

11.4 Classical Encryption Algorithms 420

End-of-chapter assessment 448

Chapter 12 Modern Cryptographic Algorithms 455

12.1 Data Encryption Standard (DES) 456

12.2 Triple DES (3DES) 461

12.3 Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 463

12.4 RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman) Encryption 472

12.5 Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange and Perfect Forward Secrecy 479

12.6 Hash Functions 485

12.7 Digital Signatures and Certificates 488

End-of-chapter assessment 495

Chapter 13 Cryptographic Protocols and Attacks 503

13.1 Transport Layer Security (TLS) 504

13.2 Secure Socket Layer (SSL) 509

13.3 Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure (HTTPS) 512

13.4 Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) 515

13.5 Internet Key Exchange (IKE) 518

13.6 Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) 521

13.7 Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) 522

13.8 STARTTLS 523

13.9 DNS-Based Authentication of Named Entities (DANE) 524

13.10 How Secure Is Gmail 524

13.11 Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with Security (SMTPS) 525

13.12 Trio of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC 525

13.13 Digital Signatures 527

13.14 Cryptographic Protocol Attacks 527

End-of-chapter assessment 538

Chapter 14 Cyber Threat Intelligence 545

14.1 SIEM Log Management 546

14.2 The Role of AI and ML in Cybersecurity 555

14.3 Digital Multimedia Forensics 565

14.4 Role of Digital Evidence in Investigations 570

14.5 Network Forensics 572

14.6 Wi-Fi Router Data: A Digital Witness in an Investigation 576

14.7 Computer vs. Network Forensics 576

14.8 Mobile Device Forensics 577

End-of-chapter assessment 584

Chapter 15 Security in Emerging Technologies 593

15.1 Blockchain 594

15.2 IoT Security 602

15.3 Security in Cloud Computing 613

15.4 DevSecOps 624

15.5 Quantum Cryptography 633

End-of-chapter assessment 639

Lab Exercises 645

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