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Smurfing and Other Mysterious Words in the Cyber World

August 12, 2015

Cyber world has its own language, often filled with acronyms and mysterious sounding words that both the good guys and the bad guys creatively come up with to describe what's happening on the dark side of the web.

If you think a Smurf Attack is a large group of tiny blue characters singing cute songs, you better read on.  

1. Pwning

Taking over or taking ownership of a device, network. etc. Pwning is not new, its just a new meaning vectored by the cyber security/hacker world. It originally came from internet slang (or leet speak) and means 'to own.' Leet, or 1337, is an elite language that came about during the 1980s from BBS Bulletin Board Services, where “elite“ status on the BBS meant you had control over the BBS or Internet Relay Chat areas. Many of today’s cyber attacks are designed to "Take Over" or "Pwn" the attacked device or system.

2. Doxing or Doxxing

Publishing personal information (PII) on the internet or other public media, often for "outing" the person, from a hidden persona is Doxing. An example can be found in the Ashley Madison hack, where the hackers are extorting the company under threat that they will Dox the millions of cheaters' information that they acquired. The hackers here are not only thieves looking for financial gain; they are also vandals intent on the site's/company's destruction through extorting the people associated with the site.

3. Heisenbug 

A software bug which fails to manifest itself during regular debugging. The word is a play on Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist who devised The Uncertainty Principle, which states "that any attempt to measure the position of a subatomic particle will disrupt its movement, making it harder to predict." 

4. Yak Shaving

This is a funny way of saying that more or useless work must be done before one can even get to the real job at hand. Scott Hanselman has the best definition: "Yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task." The term was coined by Carlin J. Vieri, a Ph.D. at MIT back in the 90s with some saying a worthless event at MIT was the origin.

5. Smurf Attack

Sounds cute, but it's a sinister method of a denial of service attack (DOS or DDOS). In a Smurf Attack a site or a system is flooded with spoofed ping (ICMP) messages which usually stops the site from responding and carrying out its original need or business. 

This is one of my lighter posts, I hope you enjoy, stay informed and stay safe.  

Looking for more tips from Tim O'Neill on Cyber Security? Check out his top 10 tips for securing your business and your home:

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Heartbeats Packets Inside the Bypass TAP

If the inline security tool goes off-line, the TAP will bypass the tool and automatically keep the link flowing. The Bypass TAP does this by sending heartbeat packets to the inline security tool. As long as the inline security tool is on-line, the heartbeat packets will be returned to the TAP, and the link traffic will continue to flow through the inline security tool.

If the heartbeat packets are not returned to the TAP (indicating that the inline security tool has gone off-line), the TAP will automatically 'bypass' the inline security tool and keep the link traffic flowing. The TAP also removes the heartbeat packets before sending the network traffic back onto the critical link.

While the TAP is in bypass mode, it continues to send heartbeat packets out to the inline security tool so that once the tool is back on-line, it will begin returning the heartbeat packets back to the TAP indicating that the tool is ready to go back to work. The TAP will then direct the network traffic back through the inline security tool along with the heartbeat packets placing the tool back inline.

Some of you may have noticed a flaw in the logic behind this solution!  You say, “What if the TAP should fail because it is also in-line? Then the link will also fail!” The TAP would now be considered a point of failure. That is a good catch – but in our blog on Bypass vs. Failsafe, I explained that if a TAP were to fail or lose power, it must provide failsafe protection to the link it is attached to. So our network TAP will go into Failsafe mode keeping the link flowing.

Glossary

  1. Single point of failure: a risk to an IT network if one part of the system brings down a larger part of the entire system.

  2. Heartbeat packet: a soft detection technology that monitors the health of inline appliances. Read the heartbeat packet blog here.

  3. Critical link: the connection between two or more network devices or appliances that if the connection fails then the network is disrupted.

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