An on-path (man-in-the-middle) attack places the adversary between the victim and a legitimate service, allowing interception and modification of traffic. A rogue or compromised Wi-Fi access point that silently proxies requests and alters DNS responses so the victim is “redirected” to cloned (phishing) versions of real sites is a canonical manifestation of an on-path attack, because the attacker transparently relays and tampers with the communication stream.

B. Site crash is a denial-of-service condition; no adversary sits “in the path” intercepting traffic.

C. Unsolicited email is a direct phishing attempt, not traffic interception between two parties.

D. Erroneous data disclosure stems from poor application or database permissions, not intermediary traffic manipulation.

1. Conti

M.

Dragoni

N.

& Lesyk

V. “A Survey of Man-in-the-Middle Attacks.” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials

vol. 18

no. 3

2016

sec. III-A

pp. 2050-2052. DOI:10.1109/COMST.2016.2548426

2. Cisco Secure Endpoint Protection White Paper

“MitM Attacks

” doc ID: CSWP-2186

v2

2021

pp. 3-4.

3. MIT OpenCourseWare

6.858 “Computer Systems Security

” Lecture 9: Network Attacks (Fall 2020)

slides 8-10.

4. NIST Special Publication 800-115

“Technical Guide to Information Security Testing & Assessment

” 2008

§4.5.3 (Man-in-the-Middle Testing)

p. 4-10.