How do hackers work?

Researchers at one U.S. university conducted an interesting study in which they observed and then analyzed the behavior of hackers and the methods they used.

Researchers at the University of Maryland connected four computers running Linux to the Internet and then monitored PC attacks for 42 days at the end of last year. University staff have recently reported their most interesting comments on the studies, which provide a lot of lessons for others.

In 42 days, the four computers were hit by a total of 270 attempted attacks. On average, someone wanted to break into a PC every 39 seconds. Of the many burglary attempts, 825 were successful. This is how many times an attacker could log on to a computer and perform various actions on them.

The university's researchers logged the attacks in detail and, after analyzing the resulting data, came to the conclusion that hackers primarily try to take advantage of the opportunities provided by improperly chosen passwords. Of course, Michel Cukier, a colleague of the university, and two of his students prepared a statistic about which usernames the attackers most often try to get into the systems. In 12,34 percent of the cases, the hackers tried to log in to the PCs as "root". In the course of the attack attempts, 1,63 percent of the users tried to attack the systems using "admin", 1,12 percent "test" and 0,84 percent "guest" usernames. In 43 percent of the cases, the attackers first tried to access the selected computers with the same password as the chosen username.

Researchers have also tried to observe how attackers behave when they manage to crack a system. In attempts, attackers, after successfully gaining access to a system, usually first crawl the computer's configuration and installed software. They then changed their passwords and then ran or installed programs.

Cukier said the investigations clearly drew attention to the real problems posed by inappropriate passwords. The person skilled in the art recommends the use of passwords of at least eight characters, containing uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters, which should be changed regularly.