There is a growing threat in the criminal world that began to become a problem after the turn of the 21st Century. The threat is cyberattacks from criminal elements seeking to take control of computers, accounts, and ultimately your money, freedom, and peace.
It starts at the ground level where millions of simple websites exist. I run a few of those sites and this is one of them. The problem may not seem severe – what harm is there in compromising a site that has no personal information, no money, just a website. They want two things. The first is they want control of, or at least access to your server so that they can use it for launching their own attacks.
Second, they want to watch your traffic. One of the things I noticed recently was the hacker tried to upload code that would put cookies into the browser. It allows them to understand the users of the infected site and the other sites they go to.
Data Science can help understand these types of attacks, give valuable information on which IPs you need to block (really the only effective defense), and also give information on what is vulnerable on your site and possible omissions.
My whitepaper writeup on this including theory, method and code will be coming soon.
