A Review of New Trends in Cyber Attacks: A Zoom into Distributed Database Systems

The recent mushrooming of new terminology for cyber-attacks signals latest trends that attackers are capitalizing on. The impact of such attacks has left many of the affected victims grounded or literally financially handicapped. As many of the security professionals are always on their toes trying to keep pace with the bad guys, it seems it is always an infinite war. Indeed there is a call for more vigilance when it comes to cyber security. It is against this background that this paper is formulated with a focus on distributed database systems. An analysis on the new trends in cyber-attacks on distributed database systems were done with a focus on identifying new trends and their effects. A desktop approach on expert reports, articles and books was employed to populate this review paper. New trends in cyber-attacks are differentiated from predecessor cyber-attack trends by looking at corresponding features that an attack possesses and the vulnerabilities being explored by attackers using new trends. An impact analysis of the new trends in cyber attacks is also presented in summary against the CIA security triad. A key business value of this research is it's relevant input data towards design of security solutions for distributed database systems and many related disciplines that directly and indirectly depend on distributed system designs.