[Incident Handling and Response Process] Alice is a disgruntled employee. She decided to acquire critical information from her organization for financial benefit. To acccomplish this, Alice started running a virtual machine on the same physical host as her victim's virtual machine and took advantage of shared physical resources (processor cache) to steal data (cryptographic key/plain text secrets) from the victim machine. Identify the type of attack Alice is performing in the above scenario.

A side channel attack, as described in the scenario, involves an attacker using indirect methods to

gather information from a system. In this case, Alice is exploiting the shared physical resources,

specifically the processor cache, of a virtual machine host to steal data from another virtual machine

on the same host. This type of attack does not directly breach the system through conventional

means like breaking encryption but instead takes advantage of the information leaked by the

physical implementation of the system, such as timing information, power consumption,

electromagnetic leaks, or, as in this case, shared resource utilization, to infer the secret data.

Reference:The EC-Council's Certified Incident Handler (ECIH v3) program covers various types of

cyber attacks, including advanced techniques like side channel attacks, highlighting the need for

comprehensive security strategies that consider both direct and indirect attack vectors.