Website Attack Tools

What is a Website Attack Tool?

A website attack tool is the way in which a malicious attacker breaches and launches attacks into an organization’s website or server. With the modern day lucrative nature of the internet, cybercriminals use many different website attack tools and techniques to gain access to the sensitive data that is found online or within a specific website. Malicious hackers often launch attacks on websites and network resources in an effort to extort money or steal valuable assets from an organization. Online hackers can make money from a compromised website by distributing malware, SEO spam and to the extent of setting up e-mail spam servers and phishing sites.

What are the Website Attack Tools Used?

As mentioned, malicious hackers are constantly developing modern ways to conduct attacks on websites and web servers, but some of the most common tools used include;

MPack – This website attack tool is used for exploitation. The tool was written in PHP and is backed by MySQL as the database engine. It conducts its attacks by compromising a website by using MPack, then redirecting all of the websites traffic to malicious download websites.

Metasploit – This website attack tool is used for developing, testing and using exploit code. The tool can be used to discover vulnerabilities in web servers and using this information write exploits that can be used to compromise the website server.

Neosplit – This website attack tool can be used to install programs, delete programs, and replicate it within an organization’s web server.

Zeus – This website attack tool can be used by malicious attackers to turn a compromised computer into a bot or zombie. Once a computer is compromised and becomes a bot it can be used to perform internet-based attacks. A botnet defines is a collection of compromised computers, which can then be used to send spam emails.

What Are the Types of Website Attacks?

Hackers may use specific website attack tools when conducting an attack to infiltrate and achieve the hoped results. However, there is a range of different ways a hacker can enforce and attack on a website or web server, some of the most common ones include:

Denial of Service Attacks – This is an attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a website or web server unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of the host server.

Sniffing – In this attack, unencrypted data is sent over the network which may be intercepted and then used to gain unauthorized access to the website’s server.

Website Defacement – In this website attack, the attacker replaces the organization’s website with a completely different page, one that contains the hacker’s name, images and may include messages.

DNS Hijack – In this website attack, the domain name system settings are changed to direct to the attacker’s web server. All traffic that was supposed to be sent to the original web server is now redirected to the wrong one.

Phishing – This website attack impersonates an organization’s website and directs traffic to a fake ‘lookalike’ website. Unsuspecting users may be unbeknown tricked into submitting sensitive data such as credit card numbers, login details etc.