Hijacking performs the act of hijacking packages on the desired route, an attacker thus taking control of one of the communication nodes. It is one of the most elaborate types of computer attacks that can be encountered in industrial networks.
As with RST and SYN flood attacks, this attack is based on TCP packet transmission that contains false values for address, port, and sequence or confirmation fields. In this case, however, the connection itself is not intended as the purpose of the attack – termination or denial of service. The purpose of the attacker is to use a connection already created in his own interest – hence the term “hijacking.” Attacks refer to the top-level session of the application protocol (Telnet, FTP, SIP) that runs over TCP, which the attacker tries to use for his own interest. As an example, we can consider an attack on a Telnet session. Telnet is a protocol that allows remote control of a console level station. The Telnet service is open at port 23 and provides a connected client with the ability to run server-level commands.
An attacker acts by sending server packets that correspond to the source IP address fields and the real client port, have valid sequence and confirmation numbers relative to the traffic being transmitted on the current connection and contain in the data part commands entered by the attacker.
Considering the generic example above as a Telnet session, the last step could be an attacker input – for example, “rm *”, which would delete all files in the current directory at the server level. Obviously, the success of the order execution also depends on the context/state of the session. For example, if that command was injected before the authentication of the real client, then it would not affect. This type of attack can be performed on various application-level protocols, the severity of the consequences of the attack depending on the state of the protocol session on the execution of the attack and the command being executed.
In order to determine the chances of success of an order injection, the attacker should know, in addition to the sequence numbers (and possibly confirmation), and the current state of the session. The “blind guessing” of the moment of message injection is therefore impractical.
For this reason, an attack of this kind normally takes place based on the interception of traffic between the two parties. Protective methods focus on encrypting this traffic, at least at the data protocol level of the application, which leads to the impossibility of determining the current state of the session.
A browser hijacker is a potentially unwanted program, usually an add-on or web browser plug-in that causes changes to your web browser settings. Such programs start working from changing the home page, the default search engine, and the new window.
As soon as the browser hijacker finishes making these changes, it gets the ability to redirect people to predetermined websites that are trying to increase their popularity. By promoting the required websites and helping them to improve visitor traffic, browser hijackers developers get money. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that all these websites are legitimate and harmless. Almost all browser hijackers are able to collect information about people’s browsing habits.
Such programs can know what search terms you use, what sites you visit most often, what upload files, what information you enter and other similar data that are considered non-personal identifiable information. However, fraudulent versions of the hijackers’ browser may attempt to collect personally identifiable data and disclose it to other third parties. It can be said that all programs classified as hijackers are launched for commercial reasons. If you want to protect your privacy and improve the security of your PC, you should remove the hijacker browser from your system.