ITPEC FE Morning October 2022 Question 35
The three properties of information security are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Which of the following is an attack on integrity?
Explanation
Website defacement — rewriting a site's content without authorisation damages integrity, the assurance that information is accurate and unaltered.
The three properties and what violates them:
- •Confidentiality: information is disclosed to someone not authorised to see it
- •Integrity: information is altered without authorisation
- •Availability: authorised users cannot reach the information or service when needed
Defacement replaces the pages of a website with the attacker's content, so the published information is no longer what its owner wrote.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) DDoS — floods a service from many machines until it cannot respond, an attack on availability
- •(b) Phishing — tricks users into revealing passwords or personal data, an attack on confidentiality
- •(c) Shoulder surfing — watching someone's screen or keyboard to read passwords or data, also confidentiality
Key rule: Ask what the attack does to the information: disclosed → confidentiality, altered → integrity, made unreachable → availability.
Security · AI-written, may contain errors
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