PENETRATRATION TESTING

A

While there are several ways of gathering information on a potential victim, information ciphering is a commonly used method implemented by cybersecurity criminals via an activity known as 'footprinting.' Footprinting involves gathering as much information as one can about a targeted network and its assets before launching an attack. Companies today use cookies and XML hooks in order to attach themselves to the surfing routine of unsuspecting users. This type of footprinting can traverse multiple personal and business devices, as many devices now use common authentication infrastructures, which inherently allow for a single individual or business to be followed, regardless of the devices that they use. This type of footprinting, while meant to benefit the marketing efforts of legit businesses, has been exploited by cybersecurity criminals. Research footprinting and discuss methodologies that can be employed by cybersecurity experts to ensure that footprinting mechanics, such as those aforementioned, can be used legitimately by businesses, instead of being hijacked by cyber criminals looking to tail personal or business private data streams.

B

Social engineering infrastructures can consist of several logical layers of communication. Some of the components within each layer may or may not include handlers. That is to say that there are certain aspects of social engineering infrastructures that are handled by manual labor, which consists of people watching and responding to the responses of others on a given social media network. Other components consists of bots, which feed responses to users in the form of both true and false information. The combination of the two component resources have led to inconsistency in social media technology infrastructures, as bots and humans compete for communication distribution space. This has led to a myriad of cybersecurity issues as bots and humans alike penetrate the information, endangering the general privacy of those participating on social media networks. Describe a strategy for dealing with such a severe issue and discuss the security methodologies you would deploy to amend the current issues surrounding social network data vulnerability.