Abstract—

            In the world of Computing
virtualization has been playing a vital role for creating virtual environment including
virtual computers, virtual servers, virtual network resources, etc. With the
increase in the technology in the current large-scale industry there is a need
of virtualization as it helps us in sharing the same hardware resources among
different virtual servers and hosts. The various frameworks have been composed
to utilize the virtualization as they help in dividing the large systems into
many sub-systems. Some require special hardware as every type of hardware does
not support virtualization. The virtualization helps in accessing nearly
limitless computer resources for faster and broader business capabilities.
There are different types of hardware and software virtualization techniques.
Which are going to be explained in this paper in detail.

 

 

Keywords- Cybercrime; Cyber criminals; hacking; attacks;
threats; Technology;  

                                                                     
I.       
 Introduction

All The development in the field of information technology
is leading to the study of latest emerging techniques of cyber security. As
they are many challenges which are being faced in the society due to different types
of hacking methods on the data of the user mobile devices and applications,
social media networking, cloud computing and different platforms 1. Cyber security helps us to
secure the data it is the protection of computer system from theft or damage of
the software or hardware of the system. Cyber security is also called as the
information security that is it is used to secure the information of the
system. These professionals are mainly focusing on the detection of attacks
rather than prevention as the time passes if a cybercriminal stays inside the
sophisticated network it will become very difficult for us to detect the cybercriminal
as they will be having a chance to hide by using security analytics.

There are different strategies which are going to be
implemented on the cyber security, these strategies help us to find the
problems in the software as well as in the hardware by different methods to
protect the data from the cyber criminals. Specific cyber security strategies
which have been used are Access control and identity management, Authenticating
the documents, Malware scanners to scan the data, Firewalls and cryptography 1 2.

Cyber criminals are the people with the most advanced
knowledge on the system as well as the social media. The behavior of the cyber
criminals varies from person to person, cyber criminals have started using the
social media to conduct their malicious behavior which includes sending spam
mails, messages, phishing links and launching some underground illicit
activities causing harm to the people as well as the government bodies by
leaking the highly secured information into the public by attacking government
bodies 3.      

                        Necessity
of cyber security

To protect from unauthorized to access the data and from
modification of our resources of the system is the basic need for cybersecurity.

To protect from online fraud, while undergoing online
transactions through internet services. Online fraud has become the major
problem created by the cyber criminals as they use different types of methods
for attacking the people through internet and causing major damage to their
bank accounts resulting the loss of money. Different organizations attract
different type of adversaries, with different goals so need different levels of
preparedness 4.

Securing of personnel accounts of the people and providing
them privacy accordingly as the attackers are concentrating more on the privacy
of the people by hacking them and misusing the accounts and the information of
the people.

The information of the industries, banks, IT companies,
must be secured to protect the data of their firms from getting attacked by the
cyber criminals so they need to build a separate unit for protecting the data
from unauthorized access.

For protecting a countries national security especially
countries which are considered as developing countries cyber security is very
important to improve the defense of the country 11. To achieve acceptable
levels of security they use embedded networks that use internet connections. To
prevent the attacks on the information they spend is nearly $2.9 Billion, or
8.5% of total IT spending on Information Security 5. And they have a
communication spending of $10.7 Billion, or 31.3% of total IT spending 5. To achieve cyber security,
the race against attackers should be maintained as they are learning fast to
apply cyberwarfare. Internet of things in smart cities has been the major point
in providing security and privacy for the people.  

 

 

  

 

Fig 1. The top 20 Countries where users faced greatest
risk of online infections 6

 

                                                                 
II.      
types of attacks

     There are different types of attacks due
to which the data which is present in the computer as well as in the web
applications is getting effected among these attacks few of the major attacks
are mentioned below

A.   Denial
of service attack

The denial of service attack is an attack that overwhelms
the system with continues service requests regarding the access of the data
from the server this not actually about the accessing of the information
present in the server or modifying the data from the server or website it is
all about preventing the actual users of the data to access the services or the
information from the specified server or website causing inconvenience to the
people who are using these services 7.

 

Fig 2. Denial of Service Attack 8

 

This type of attack is caused by sending thousands of
requests to the server at the same time and making the system unable to
distinguish between the valid and the invalid request to the server. The hacker
floods the internet router with the special traffic even if the router can distinguish
certain packets but it cannot do that as the speed is not fast enough to
support the router and slowly the performance of the router degrades and
crashes.

There are few stats which are collected from Kaspersky Lab
related to denial of service attack all over the world in the years of 2015,
and 2016 6.

 

 

 

Fig 3. The above stats show that 94.7% of all attacks had
targets within the Top 10 most targeted countries 6

 

 

 

 

 

Fig 4. The below graph represents the attacks which
occurred between 01-01-2016 and 03-31-2016. The peak number of attacks were
recorded on 31St march which were 1272 attacks. 6

 

 

B.   Injection
attack

Injection attack is an attack which can be performed on
all the applications which can be accessed through the internet. This attack
can be performed by the attacker by injecting data into a web application
causing interpretation of malicious data in an unexpected manner 9. If an attacker gets access
to the database of the web application and if he can execute the SQL command on
the database, then he can do anything with the database so to protect the
database we need to create strong validation of user input so the attacker
would not be able to send such type of commands to the database. We need to
make sure that form validation done through SQL is not sent to the database.

 

 

 

 

 

Fig 5. Injection Attack 10

 

C.    Remote code execution attack

A Cyber-criminal is a person who gains access to the
user’s computer through some sort of vulnerability and there by executing the
code on the user’s system. They exploit the software bugs or other
vulnerabilities which are called as arbitrary code execution exploits. These
type of attacks exploits the software by allowing them to inject shell code to
run arbitrary commands on the target system. This type of attack is also known
as the Remote code execution attack and it allows the attacker to gain complete
control over the target computer 11.

 

Fig 6. Remote
Code Execution Attack 12

 

D.   Cross-site
scripting attack

The major vulnerability at present is the cross-site
scripting attack. If a person is building any kind of web application or
software, he must be aware of this type of attack.

Cross-site scripting attack is among the most unchecked
vulnerabilities among the web and occurs when a web application makes use of
unencoded user input within the output it generates. This type of attack does
not attack the victim directly but attacker would exploit a vulnerability within
the web application which the user visits and then through the web application
the victim’s system gets attacked 13.

In this attack the attacker first identifies a website
that has one or more XSS bugs and then he generates a URL that includes a
malformed and malicious query string containing HTML and script. And now the
attacker is in search of a person and when the victim finally clicks the link
then the victim browser makes a GET request to the vulnerable server, passing
the malicious query string. Now it sends back the malicious input, including
the script back to the victim’s computer. This malicious script is crafted to
send information or data from the victim to the attacker. 

 

 

 

 

Fig 5. Cross Site Scripting Attack
14

 

          ethical
values to establish cyber security

Ethical values plays an important role in the field of
cyber security as the cyber security deals with the people’s personal content.

Online trust and innovation is being threatened by
widening the gap among the users 2. The gap between the users is
increased due to new capacities for benefits and harms generated by
technological advancements.

 To narrow the gap
among the users we must build the trust. We need to build ethical values among
the participants by underlying the principles and applications. Backing for the
strategy that attempts to educate stakeholders. The security research mainly
focuses on the behavior of the user and ensuring ethical conduct. Such
knowledge helps in preventing specifically phishing type of attacks on the user2.

 

                                                         
III.     
Nato on cyber defense

NATO(North Atlantic Treaty Organization) has affirmed that
international laws apply on cyber space. The cybercrime has become more common
among the networks and causing heavy damage to the Security. State and Non-state
actors can use the cyber-attacks in context of military operations, they also
had become the part of hybrid warfare. NATO and its alliances depend on
resilient cyber defenses to accomplish the task of collective defense, crisis
management, and co-operative security. In July 2016 NATO reaffirmed defensive
mandate and recognized cyber space as a domain of operations in which NATO must
defend itself effectively as it defends in the air, land, sea15.

 

 Cyber defense has
become the core task of NATO’s collective defense. NATO does not depend on any
other organization for the defense it has got its own networks for cyber
defense. Smart Defense helps the countries to work together and maintain
capabilities which are not affordable by all other countries. The smart Defense
projects in cyber defense so far, include the Malware Information Sharing Platform
(MISP), the Smart Defense Multinational Cyber Defense Capability Development
(MN CD2) project, and the Multinational Cyber Defense Education and Training
(MN CD E&T) project.

                      

                                               
IV.     
Methods of safeguarding data

While protecting the data from the cyber criminals we need
to follow certain standards to control the systems against malicious
cyber-attacks. We know that there are different preventive methods in the
present day several sectors including the oil, gas, electricity, etc. are
developing programs for securing their data and infrastructure. The electric
sector is leading the way with the north American electric reliability
corporation(NERC) cybersecurity standards for control systems 16.

 

A.   Firewalls:

The basic method is the Firewall as they are considered as
the first line of defense to protect the data from cyber-criminals. We need to
have a firewall on the system to check the access control links which will have
access to our system while we are using the internet 17. The firewalls play a vital
role in the security of the system. They examine the traffic routed between the
two networks to meet certain criteria. They filter both the inbound and the
outbound traffic.

          The function
of firewalls is to filter the packets based on their source and destination
addresses and port numbers. That is also called as address filtering.

 

B.   Antivirus:

Antivirus is a computer software that is used to prevent the
attacks of cyber-criminals by preventing the malicious code. It also refers to
the traditional means of fighting malicious code. They also work against other
types of malware, such as malicious browser helper objects, browser hijackers,
ransomware, key loggers, backdoors etc.

There are different types of Antivirus software’s for
different computers some are designed for personal computers and some are
designed for enterprises. Depending on the way they fix viruses antiviruses are
in different forms they are Anti-virus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-spam Applications.

 

 

C.   Cryptography:

Cryptography is an art of science that is used for
transforming messages to make them immune to attack This is used to encrypt
information using an algorithm called as cipher to mask the information in
storage. It is a large derivative security measure.

 

There are two types of cryptography

·      
Symmetric key cryptography

·      
Asymmetric key cryptography

 

Symmetric
key cryptography:

              Symmetric key cryptography is also
known as secret key cryptography. In this the sender and the receiver uses the
same key and an encryption/ decryption algorithm to encrypt or decrypt data.

 

Asymmetric
key cryptography:

              Asymmetric key cryptography is
also known as the public key cryptography. In the asymmetric key cryptography
sender and the receiver uses different keys for encryption and decryption
namely public and private keys. 

 

 

 

 

Fig 4.  File
Encryption and Decryption 18

 

Cryptography is mainly used in Defense services as the
information passed among them is very confidential so they use these services
to protect the data from attacks. Internet payment systems, business
transactions also use this method as it involves high security.

A secure channel exists along which the data is transmitted
to the other channels. In this the messages are encrypted using a specific
algorithm and sent to the receiver and a key at the receiver’s end decrypts the
data and convert it into a plain text.

 

D.   Network
Monitoring tools:

Network monitoring tools are also known as networking tools.
The main aim of these tools is to monitor the performance of the system, the
faults in the system and the account. These tools are used to monitor all the
networks for detecting the intrusions or suspicious traffic. They are also used
to examine the usage of local area network and provide statistical data of
uploads and downloads. the monitoring tool monitors the I/P traffic between the
Lan and the internet. It also monitors the network for problems caused by
overloaded or crashed servers.

These tools are further used to improve the network
efficiency. problems such as locating the down server and receiving the
incorrect work request can also be removed by using the network monitoring
tools.