CompTIA Security+ Question K-7

Which of the following is characterized by an attack against a mobile device?

A. Evil twin
B. Header manipulation
C. Blue jacking
D. Rogue AP

Answer: C

Explanation:
A bluejacking attack is where unsolicited messages are sent to mobile devices using Bluetooth. Bluejacking is the sending of unsolicited messages over Bluetooth to Bluetooth-enabled devices such as mobile phones, PDAs or laptop computers, sending a vCard which typically contains a message in the name field (i.e., for bluedating or bluechat) to another Bluetooth-enabled device via the OBEX protocol. Bluetooth has a very limited range, usually around 10 metres (32.8 ft) on mobile phones, but laptops can reach up to 100 metres (328 ft) with powerful (Class 1) transmitters. Bluejacking is usually harmless, but because bluejacked people generally don’t know what has happened, they may think that their phone is malfunctioning. Usually, a bluejacker will only send a text message, but with modern phones it’s possible to send images or sounds as well. Bluejacking has been used in guerrilla marketing campaigns to promote advergames.

CompTIA Security+ Question I-39

Peter, a user, in a coffee shop is checking his email over a wireless network. An attacker records the temporary credentials being passed to Peter’s browser. The attacker later uses the credentials to impersonate Peter and creates SPAM messages. Which of the following attacks allows for this impersonation?

A. XML injection
B. Directory traversal
C. Header manipulation
D. Session hijacking

Answer: D

Explanation:
In computer science, session hijacking, sometimes also known as cookie hijacking is the exploitation of a valid computer session—sometimes also called a session key—to gain unauthorized access to information or services in a computer system. In particular, it is used to refer to the theft of a magic cookie used to authenticate a user to a remote server. It has particular relevance to web developers, as the HTTP cookies used to maintain a session on many web sites can be easily stolen by an attacker using an intermediary computer or with access to the saved cookies on the victim’s computer.

CompTIA Security+ Question F-16

Data execution prevention is a feature in most operating systems intended to protect against which type of attack?

A. Cross-site scripting
B. Buffer overflow
C. Header manipulation
D. SQL injection

Answer: B

Explanation:
Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a security feature included in modern operating systems. It marks areas of memory as either “executable” or “nonexecutable”, and allows only data in an “executable” area to be run by programs, services, device drivers, etc. It is known to be available in Linux, OS X, Microsoft Windows, iOS and Android operating systems. DEP protects against some program errors, and helps prevent certain malicious exploits, especially attacks that store executable instructions in a data area via a buffer overflow.

A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite amount of data, the extra information – which has to go somewhere – can overflow into adjacent buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them. Although it may occur accidentally through programming error, buffer overflow is an increasingly common type of security attack on data integrity. In buffer overflow attacks, the extra data may contain codes designed to trigger specific actions, in effect sending new instructions to the attacked computer that could, for example, damage the user’s files, change data, or disclose confidential information. Buffer overflow attacks are said to have arisen because the C programming language supplied the framework, and poor programming practices supplied the vulnerability.

CompTIA Security+ Question C-86

A security administrator looking through IDS logs notices the following entry: (where email=joe@joe.com and passwd= ‘or 1==1’)
Which of the following attacks had the administrator discovered?

A. SQL injection
B. XML injection
C. Cross-site script
D. Header manipulation

Answer: A

Explanation:
The code in the question is an example of a SQL Injection attack. The code ‘1==1’ will always provide a value of true. This can be included in statement designed to return all rows in a SQL table.

SQL injection is a code injection technique, used to attack data-driven applications, in which malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution (e.g. to dump the database contents to the attacker). SQL injection must exploit a security vulnerability in an application’s software, for example, when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. SQL injection is mostly known as an attack vector for websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database.

CompTIA Security+ Question A-70

While opening an email attachment, Peter, a customer, receives an error that the application has encountered an unexpected issue and must be shut down. This could be an example of which of the following attacks?

A. Cross-site scripting
B. Buffer overflow
C. Header manipulation
D. Directory traversal

Answer: B

Explanation:
When the user opens an attachment, the attachment is loaded into memory. The error is caused by a memory issue due to a buffer overflow attack.

A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite amount of data, the extra information – which has to go somewhere – can overflow into adjacent buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them. Although it may occur accidentally through programming error, buffer overflow is an increasingly common type of security attack on data integrity. In buffer overflow attacks, the extra data may contain codes designed to trigger specific actions, in effect sending new instructions to the attacked computer that could, for example, damage the user’s files, change data, or disclose confidential information. Buffer overflow attacks are said to have arisen because the C programming language supplied the framework, and poor programming practices supplied the vulnerability.