The dangers in the Internet arise in principle from completely different motives. On the one hand the perpetrators try to enrich themselves personally or to damage the victims systematically. By the ever increasing know-how of the perpetrators, the “hacking” became already a kind of sports, in which young people often measure who takes at first the hurdles of Internet security.
Regardless of the individual motivation, the intention of the perpetrators mostly leads to the following aims:
- Inspect confidential information such as trade secrets, access information, passwords for bank accounts etc.
- Use of LAN workstations for purposes of the attackers, e. g. for the distribution of own contents, attacks to third workstations etc.
- Modify data of LAN workstations, e. g. to obtain even further ways for access.
- Destroy data on the workstations of the LAN.
- Paralyze workstations of the LAN or the connection to the Internet.
Note: We restrict ourselves in this section to the attacks of local networks
(LAN) resp. to workstations and servers in such LANs.