Attack

Overview

An attack is intentional activity directed at exploiting a weakness, deceiving a participant, exhausting resources, bypassing controls, or changing expected system behavior. It may target people, software, infrastructure, cryptography, business processes, or third-party dependencies.

Attacks range from automated scanning and credential abuse to fraud, denial of service, insider misuse, supply-chain compromise, and sophisticated multi-stage intrusions. Success does not always require a software vulnerability because legitimate functions can be abused at scale or under false identity.

Security teams analyze attacker objectives, capabilities, access, techniques, and potential impact. Prevention, detection, containment, recovery, and learning all matter because no single control can reliably block every path or eliminate every exploitable condition.

An attack is a deliberate attempt to compromise confidentiality, integrity, availability, authorization, assets, or trust within a system. An attack exploits technical or human weaknesses to violate expected security, so defense must cover prevention, detection, response, and recovery.

Assessment of Attack should trace an attempt to compromise confidentiality, integrity, availability, authorization, assets, or trust within a system from prerequisite and entry point through observable impact on the affected service. A theoretical weakness or scanner result involving confidentiality, integrity, and availability should not be reported as exploitation without corroborating logs, transactions, or configuration evidence. Prevention, detection, containment, and recovery for the adversarial path should be tested against the architecture associated with confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Retesting for Attack should reproduce the adversarial path involving confidentiality, integrity, and availability, examine adjacent paths, and verify the conditions for safely returning the affected service to normal operation.