Man in the middle attack

A Man-in-the-Middle attack is a type of cyber attack where a malicious actor inserts him/herself into a conversation between two parties, impersonates both parties and gains access to information that the two parties were trying to send to each other. A Man-in-the-Middle Attack allows a malicious actor to intercept, send and receive data meant for someone else, or not meant to be sent at all, without either outside party knowing until it is too late. Man-in-the-Middle attacks can be abbreviated in many ways including, MITM, MitM, MiM, or MIM.

• Man-in-the-Middle is a type of eavesdropping attack that occurs when a malicious actor inserts himself as a relay/proxy into a communication session between people or systems.
• A MITM attack exploits the real time processing of transactions, conversations, or transfer of other data.
• A Man-in-the-Middle attack allows an attacker to intercept, send, and receive data never meant to be for them without either outside party knowing until it is too late.

A man in the middle attack is one in which the attacker intercepts messages in a public key exchange and then retransmits them, substituting his own public key for the requested one, so that the two original parties still appear to be communicating with each other.

The attack gets its name from the ball game where two people try to throw a ball directly to each other while one person in between them attempts to catch it. In a man in the middle attack, the intruder uses a program that appears to be the server to the client and appears to be the client to the server. The attack may be used simply to gain access to the message, or enable the attacker to modify the message before retransmitting it.

Man in the middle attacks are sometimes known as fire brigade attacks. The term derives from the bucket brigade method of putting out a fire by handing buckets of water from one person to another between a water source and the fire.

An attack where a user gets between the sender and receiver of information and sniffs any information being sent. In some cases, users may be sending unencrypted data, which means the man-in-the-middle (MITM) can obtain any unencrypted information. In other cases, a user may be able to obtain information from the attack, but have to unencrypt the information before it can be read. In the picture below is an example of how a man-in-the-middle attack works. The attacker intercepts some or all traffic coming from the computer, collects the data, and then forwards it to the destination the user was originally intending to visit.