Spectrum Technologies uses SHA 256 to share confidential information. The enterprise reported a breach of confidential data by a threat actor. You are asked to verify the cause of the attack that occurred despite implementing secure cryptography in communication. Which type of attack should you consider first, and why?

A: Known ciphertext attack; the attacker can create the cryptographic keys from ciphertext because of the SHA 256 algorithm.

B: Downgrade attack; SHA 256 is vulnerable to downgrades in the operating system to earlier versions, allowing threat actors to easily attack.

C: Misconfiguration attack; the company should have configured a higher security hash algorithm rather than using the less-secure SHA 256.

D: Collision attacks; the threat actor has created a malicious file with the same digest using SHA 256.