A children’s guide to cyberattacks and pentesting
The simple folks lived in a virtual shire. Their life was simple and easy. They had small shops that they called websites.
Do you know what a website is? I’m sure you do. It’s like a house on the internet that you carefully decorate with all your heart. You store all your things on the website and invite people from all around the world to come, look at those things, and maybe buy some of your creations.
Whenever a new person came to a website, the simple folk would note down their name, and some other important information, and the people would use their credit cards to pay the simple folk for the things. Now, this practice turned the websites into large stores of sensitive information or data.
And some people saw an opportunity in this.
But why is data so important?
Data is what helps you understand your customers, locate them, and do business with them. It also helps you change things in your business to help the customers further. Data is expensive, and sensitive data like credit card information, and social security numbers, are sold at high prices in the virtual underworld.
Some decided to steal the data!
A group of smart people learned how to enter the simple folk’s website undetected and steal their precious data, destroy their little shops, and kill their happy businesses. These wicked people called thems the cyber-goons, they are also known as blackhat hackers.
The simple folks were scared. They were no longer happy, and their life was no longer easy. They became paranoid with the fear of being looted by the hackers. They started installing stronger doors and bigger locks on their websites. They even got firewalls to stop them from entering their sites. But nothing seemed to work. And the customers started losing trust in their shops.
The cyber goons were so smart that they always found a way to breach security and enter the shop.
But how did they breach security?
The cyber goons had pet robots. They would send the robots to sniff around the simple folks’ websites and find weaknesses in their security. These weaknesses are also called vulnerabilities.
Sometimes the websites would have a weak lock that was not repaired for a long time, sometimes they would have a secret code that is no longer a secret, and sometimes they would have a cyber goon disguised as a customer.
No matter how hard the simple folks tried, all their efforts were turned to rubble by the attacks of the cyber goons – the cyberattacks.
They were about to give up
They decided to close shops, move out of the shire, and do something else. Maybe sell their wares from little ox-drawn carts instead of websites. If they did that they would lose all their customers around the world, and their business would fall on its face. But they could not see another option.
Luckily for them, all the hackers were not cyber goons.
One of the simple folk mastered the same skills as the cyber goons and turned into a good hacker – a white hat hacker
This person decided to do something about their situation and announced that the cyber goons will be stopped. The plan was to try and penetrate the websites’ security just as a cyber goon would but not for stealing anything. The good hacker called it penetration testing or pentest.
The simple folks finally saw a ray of hope amidst all the abysmal despair. They named the good hacker Captain Pentest.
Now, Captain Pentest frequently visited all the websites in the shire and found loopholes in the security with the help of hacker-style methods. Then, the captain made a report about all the problems – all the gaps, and mistakes that the cyber goons can use to enter the websites and rob them. The simple folks tool these reports and fixed all the issues pointed out by the captain.
The cyber goons were frustrated!
With the help of Captain Pentest, the simple folks were constantly updating their security. The cyber goons found it harder and harder to breach into any website. But they kept on trying. They kept researching new vulnerabilities and ways of exploiting them. Captain Pentest had to keep up to keep the shire secure.
This tussle is still on!
The cyber attackers try to break into websites, and the pentester like Captain Pentest, try to protect the websites by finding the weaknesses in their security before the attackers.
You know, you can become like Captain Pentest and save websites from being hacked by cybercriminals. Would you be interested in fighting cybercrime?
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