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Ask HN: Do cyber attacks happen slowly or quickly?

6 points by niche ↗ HN
Seems like Target etc were hacked over long periods of time. And they slowly leaked data and money.

When they find out about these attacks, they make it seem like one incident where 50,000 people were targeted.

Is this true? Or are these attacks usually incremental and the PR play is just to act like it is a one-shot?

3 comments

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patio11
Yes. Also, both.

An attack is just a special case of building a computer system. Planning, building, and testing often take a while. Execution can happen very quickly indeed. If you time the attack from "start of execution of final payload script" through "last byte of data transferred by payload script" then many commercially significant attacks were over in milliseconds.

niche
"An attack is just a special case of building a computer system." ~insightful
some_furry
Everything patio11 said, but with an addendum:

If you're trying to evade a behavioral Intrusion Detection System while exfiltrating the data, sending a small trickle over a long period of time is less obvious than sending 2 TB overnight and increases your odds of success.