Cryptanalytic attacks: brute force, side channel, man-in-the-middle, pass the hash, ransomware

Cryptanalytic attacks try to defeat cryptography or the systems built around it. The surprising lesson from decades of real incidents is that attackers rarely break the mathematics of a modern algorithm such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Instead they exploit weak keys, poor implementations, leaked credentials, careless users or the fact that data must eventually be decrypted to be used. The CISSP outline groups several of these together, and your job as a security professional is to recognize each category and match it to the defense that actually works.