Question

A competitor goes to your public website and discovers that they can get into a directory that you did not know could be reached. There, they find a list of customers and use the list to their advantage. Have they hacked your web server

Answer 1

Answer:

Yes, directory traversal attack.

Explanation:

A website is a collection big web pages hosted on a web server. It contains contents like links and sometimes directory root paths. This a vulnerability attacks an exploit to access the information in a database.

There are two access to a database. One is the authentication process issued for authorised user access and the other is the root access only accessible to the network administrator. It contains paths to directories in the servers.

A directory traversal attack or path attack is done through a web browser by an attacker, who seeks for a weak path link on the public's website and accesses the information in the server.