Ethical Hacking Essentials Practice Test

What type of attack was performed by Smith when he placed a malicious virtual machine on the same physical host as the target cloud server?

1. Phishing Attack

2. Denial-of-Service Attack

3. Side-channel attacks

4. Man-in-the-Middle Attack

The correct answer is: Side-channel attacks

Placing a malicious virtual machine on the same physical host as the target cloud server is indicative of a side-channel attack. This type of attack exploits vulnerabilities that arise from shared resources in virtualized environments. By having access to the same physical hardware, the attacker can potentially gather sensitive information or perform actions by observing the behavior and resource usage of the target virtual machine. In cloud computing, multiple virtual machines often run on the same physical server, sharing CPU, memory, and other resources. Side-channel attacks take advantage of this shared environment, where the attacker can monitor performance metrics or resource usage patterns to infer data from other virtual machines. Phishing attacks focus on tricking individuals into providing sensitive information through deceptive emails or messages. Denial-of-Service attacks aim to make a service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic. Man-in-the-Middle attacks involve intercepting communication between two parties. These types of attacks do not involve the exploitation of virtualization vulnerabilities in the manner described in the scenario, which is why they are not applicable here.