Network Attacks

Network attacks target the communication infrastructure that connects systems. Understanding these attacks is essential for ethical hackers, as network-level vulnerabilities can expose all data in transit and enable access to systems that are otherwise well-secured at the application level.

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Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) Attacks

A MITM attack intercepts communication between two parties without their knowledge:

Normal Communication:
Client ←────────────────→ Server

MITM Attack:
Client ←───→ Attacker ←───→ Server
         (intercepts and
          relays traffic)

MITM Attack Types

Attack	Description	Layer
ARP Spoofing	Poison the ARP cache to redirect traffic	Layer 2
DNS Spoofing	Return forged DNS responses	Layer 7
DHCP Spoofing	Act as a rogue DHCP server	Layer 2/3
SSL Stripping	Downgrade HTTPS to HTTP	Layer 4/7
Evil Twin	Create a rogue Wi-Fi access point	Layer 1/2

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ARP Spoofing

The Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) maps IP addresses to MAC addresses. ARP has no authentication, making it trivially exploitable:

How It Works