Report Shows DoS Attacks as Hacker's Favorite Weapons

Almost a quarter of all cyber masterminds prefer to use DoS or DDoS attacks, while 19% rely on SQL injections to complete their evil missions.

After doing some digging on a popular hacker forum, the guys at Imperva came up with a report called "Hacker Intelligence Initiative, Monthly Trend Report", that shows these are the favorite means of attack, most deployed by cybercriminals.

Disturbing is the fact that most of the discussions on the tested website refer to tutorials for beginners, tools, programs and methods of hitting a site. Social engineering takes up 3% of the topics and instant messaging hacks come almost last with 2%.

In the past years, the subjects of debate haven't changed that much, but they've considerably increased. Spam, DoS, buffer overflows and zero-day vulnerabilities occupy the first positions when it comes to the growth of conversations.

Mobile devices are not left aside by the members, the figures showing that in 2010, compared to 2009 the arguments on iPhone related attacks have grown four times. Android platforms are also hot, more than 2000 topics being recorded in the past year.

According to the paper, these forums are a great way to research the activity of veteran and wannabe cybercriminals.

“Chat rooms are filled with technical subjects ranging from advice on attack planning and solicitations for help with specific campaigns. Commercially, forums are a marketplace for selling of stolen data and attack software.

"Most surprisingly, forums build a sense of community where members can engage in discussions on religion, philosophy and relationships,” the study reveals.

Since hacking became mostly a group activity, communication is crucial between the members of each gang and that's the main reason why several thousand of these websites were developed.

“Technical complexities have made hacking too difficult for any single individual to conduct attacks successfully – as recently evidenced by the hacking team called Lulzsec. For hackers participating in illegal activity the challenge is to preserve anonymity while finding and communicating with partners,” the study further shows.