Attack Techniques
Every page here follows the same locked structure: what the technique is, what it actually exploits, how to detect it, what it costs a real business, and how it's prevented or responded to. Grounded in CAPEC and MITRE ATT&CK where an ID is confidently known, not guessed.
Advanced Persistent Threat (APT)
What distinguishes a sustained, patient, multi-stage intrusion from a single opportunistic attack, and why detecting one takes a different posture than catching a fast, loud attack.
Ceiling: HighAI-Powered Attacks
How generative AI lowers the cost of convincing phishing and deepfake-enabled social engineering at scale, and what actually changes for defense as a result.
Ceiling: MediumBrute Force
How systematic password guessing works against real-world rate limits and account lockouts, and why it succeeds almost exclusively against weak or default credentials.
Ceiling: CriticalBusiness Email Compromise (BEC)
Why targeted, researched impersonation of an executive or vendor causes some of the largest direct financial losses of any attack technique on this list, and how it's actually verified against.
Ceiling: HighCredential Stuffing
Why a data breach at one company routinely becomes a working login at a completely unrelated company, and why this is the rare attack that requires no vulnerability in the target's own code at all.
Ceiling: MediumCryptojacking
Why an attacker would rather quietly steal your computing power than your data, and how this resource-theft attack is detected differently from a typical data breach.
Ceiling: HighDenial-of-Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)
How flooding attacks actually overwhelm a system's real capacity limits, why "more bandwidth" alone isn't the fix, and how severity should be measured by business impact of downtime, not attack size.
Ceiling: HighDNS Spoofing and Poisoning
How corrupting the translation between a domain name and its real address silently redirects legitimate traffic to an attacker, and why DNSSEC exists specifically to close this gap.
Ceiling: HighDNS Tunneling
How encoding data inside ordinary DNS queries turns a protocol every network trusts and rarely inspects into a covert channel for data theft or remote control.
Ceiling: HighDrive-by Download
How malware ends up on a device just from viewing a webpage, with no file ever knowingly opened or downloaded by the victim.
Ceiling: HighInsider Threat
Why harm from someone who already has legitimate access is often more damaging and harder to detect than an external attack, and what actually distinguishes malicious intent from an honest mistake.
Ceiling: MediumIoT-Based Attacks
Why internet-connected cameras, sensors, and controllers are such a reliable target at scale, and how a device with nothing valuable on it still becomes a serious problem.
Ceiling: MediumIP Spoofing
How forging a packet's source address lets an attacker hide their origin or turn a network into an amplifier that floods someone else's server with traffic.
Ceiling: HighMalware
The umbrella category behind ransomware, rootkits, and cryptojacking, what defines something as malware, how it gets onto a system, and why the category name matters less than behavior and reach.
Ceiling: HighMan-in-the-Middle (MITM)
How an attacker secretly sits between two parties who believe they're talking directly to each other, and why encryption alone only closes part of this gap.
Ceiling: HighPhishing
How phishing actually works end to end, why it keeps succeeding against trained people, and what a business is really buying when it invests in defenses against it.
Ceiling: CriticalRansomware
How a ransomware incident unfolds from initial access to encryption, why backups alone aren't the complete defense people assume, and what severity really depends on.
Ceiling: CriticalRootkit
How malware specifically designed to hide itself defeats normal detection, and why removal often requires rebuilding a system rather than trusting it to clean itself.
Ceiling: HighSession Hijacking
How reusing a valid, already-authenticated session token grants full account access without the victim's password, and why this is so often the real consequence of another flaw.
Ceiling: HighSocial Engineering
Why manipulating a person is consistently more reliable than defeating a technical control, and how pretexting and vishing succeed even against organizations with strong technical defenses.
Ceiling: CriticalSupply Chain Attack
How compromising one trusted vendor becomes a compromise of every downstream customer who trusted them, and why this is one of the hardest attack types to defend against with your own controls alone.
Ceiling: HighWatering Hole Attack
Why compromising a website your actual target already trusts and visits is often more effective than attacking them directly, and how this bypasses "don't click suspicious links" advice entirely.
Ceiling: CriticalZero-Day Exploit
Why an attack against an unknown, unpatched flaw can't be stopped by patching, and what actually limits the damage when no vendor fix exists yet.