How are hackers able to find such complicated exploits?
In: Technology
ELI5 Edition: Protecting a computer/network is like building a brick wall around your castle. You need to have all of the bricks secure and stacked properly so your wall will be strong and keep out intruders. Intruders (hackers) only need to find one weak brick out of the thousands of bricks that you put in the wall, break that brick, and it all comes crumbling down. Now they’re in your castle.
ELI10 Additional information: There’s TONS of ways to break a brick. Maybe a hammer, sure! Maybe you need to freeze a brick with liquid nitrogen, then hit it with a hammer and it breaks. Maybe the brick is strong, but can be dissolved in water. Or acid.
Hackers have giant toolboxes they use that have all the equipment they need to test for what types of bricks are in the wall, and then they’ll know if they have any ways to break any of these bricks. Some toolboxes you can find laying around for free (metasploit). Others might be super secret that no intruder wants to ever let their secret get out. Sometimes intruders even steal tools from other intruders!
Now to be smart and sneaky, they don’t go around banging on all the bricks and throwing acid everywhere just to see what sticks. That would be too noisy and you, the person in the castle, would probably hear them and try to fight them off. Instead, they’ll very methodically run some tests on all the bricks and see if anything comes up. It could take lots of time to run all these tests, but if the jewels in the castle are really pretty, it’s worth the wait. Finally, if/when just ONE of their tests come back with a known way to break it, that’s all they need, and they’re in your castle. (This is penetration testing)
And now for how they actually come up with these ways to break a brick? Patience, knowledge, creativity, and more patience. Some mad scientist, who has studied bricks very heavily, sat in a lab with a brick and tried every way he possibly could to come up with new ways to break a brick. He’ll try to heat it up, sing to it at just the right pitch, turn it upside down three times under a full moon. Maybe he even tried to go to the brick maker and blackmail him. “Put this secret powder in your brick batter or I tell your wife about your ‘poker night’. Don’t ask any questions!” Then the mad scientist has a special chemical that reacts with the secret powder and blows up!
Sometimes the mad scientist has a particular castle in mind when he’s working with these bricks, other times he just went to the brick store and bought their 100 most popular bricks, just to see what he could do. If he’s a “good” mad scientist, he’ll tell the people in the castle that their bricks are weak and they should fix them. But if he’s not, he might try to break in himself, or sell his new brick breaking method to someone else, or maybe he just tells everyone about it on Reddit because he likes to see the world in chaos!
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