MITM-ATTACK AS A WAY OF COMMITTING CRIMES IN THE FIELD OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY УДК 343.985

Abstract

In the context of digitalization of society, criminal activity becomes more complicated. Criminals seek to use information technology to improve the mechanism of committing a crime, concealing traces of criminal activity, and complicating the activities of law enforcement agencies in identifying, solving and investigating crimes. The widespread use of information technologies to commit criminal acts is largely due to the presence of a large number of objects of information influence on the part of criminals, which leads to the emergence of variability in the methods of committing crimes. This article discusses the «MITM attack» as one of the ways to commit cybercrimes. The peculiarity of this method is that the criminal intercepts information between two end users and uses the information thus obtained for criminal purposes. This type of attack has many different options for its implementation, depending on the chosen means of influencing users or exploiting a specific vulnerability. The effectiveness of this type of attack is determined by the factor in which two interacting users form the illusion of direct communication between each other, when in fact the criminal interferes with the communication process and transforms it to obtain confidential information. Various possibilities for cybercriminals to carry out an attack using this method have been studied. In particular, such methods of committing a “MITM attack” as e-mail hacking, session interception, sniffing, SSL stripping, and Wi-Fi interception are considered.