Passive attacks

In a passive attack, the attacker is considered to be in a learning (monitoring) state to understand the details about the potential victim's device, how it performs and operates.  This allows the attacker to have a better attack strategy. An example of a passive attack is where an attacker is sniffing the network traffic between a victim machine and its default gateway.

Types of passive attack:

• Sniffing: Capturing packets unknown to users on the network. The goal is to obtain any sensitive information sent across the network.
• Port scanning: Checking for open TCP and UDP ports. This will aid the attacker in determining the services running on the target/victim machine.