Thursday, April 26, 2012

Common Networking Attacks Threats and Solution

Everyday,everywhere,you will also be able to see IT technology influences,and behind the technology,networking is essential for us to communicate with other everyone living in the world,including those living at the other end of Earth.
But do you know that despite the normal peaceful looking days,there are numerous of networking attacks going on around the world,for example,according to the Department of Homeland Security Official in United States,there are close to 15,000 networking attacks purely on federal sites,which means that there are at least one networking attack on federal sites every 10 seconds!! So at this point,I will be going through some common networking attack and also solutions to them.
Among all the networking attack methods,these seven methods are the most common; Spoofing,Sniffing,Mapping,Hijacking,Trojans,DoS & DDoS (Denial-of-Service & Distributed Denial-of-Service) and Social Engineering. And I will be talking about Spoofing,Trojans,Dos & DDoS. Since these are the most common networking attack threats known to everyone.


1.Spoofing
Spoofing is the process where the attacker modifies a device's protocol to plant a random IP address in the data packet's source address field,this way it will be able to conceal the payload's original source and allows the attacker to avoid being detected.
One countermeasure that is commonly used to prevent spoofing is ingress filtering which usually involves the Routers. During this process,the Routers will check the incoming IP address and determine whether the source address are reachable via the interface or not. If the source is from an unreachable range, the packets will be discarded.


2.Trojans
As most of us knows,Trojans is one of the more common type of networking attack known to everyone. Trojans are programs that appears like usual software in the systems,yet they are used to perform unintended and malicious actions when launched.An infected file will look,function and similar in the file size as the affected file.
The only way to prevent Trojan attacks is to use a crytographic checksum or binary digital signature.


3.DoS&DDoS
Commonly known as Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service. As most of us are aware of the hacking group,Anonymous,which hacked several U.S federal sites last year during the event where the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) act were carried out. This hacking group,Anonymous,launched a series of DoS & DDoS attacks on the different U.S federal sites after several file sharing sites were either forced to shut down or being limited in the files they are able to share,for example,megaupload and some other commonly known online video streaming sites.
And thus,from what most of us should know if we have read the news,DoS&DDoS are actually attacks that floods the network with useless traffic so that it will disrupt the computation resources such as bandwidth,disk space and CPU time.The purposes of DoS&DDoS attack are usually to slow down the network's performance,prevents the site to be accessed by any other users.
Sadly,there isn't much ways to prevent DoS&DDoS attacks,however,ingress filtering were commonly used to control  DoS&DDoS attacks to a small extent.


Last but not least,I just hope that everyone reading this post will be able to get a fresh new idea about common networking attacks and also some countermeasures especially for these three common networking attacks.


Reference: http://ayurveda.hubpages.com/hub/Types-of-Network-Attacks

1 comment:

  1. Through Jeremy’s post, I learnt that Information Technology is important for networking and communication today. There are many network attacks launched in the internet. This is why identifying attacks, threats, and finding solutions for cyber-attacks is very important. Some most common attack methods are Spoofing and Trojans. Spoofing is whereby the attackers modifies a device protocol to change the IP address in the data packet source address. This conceals the attackers identify and allows the attacker to remain undetected. Trojans are programs that usually come with a normal software. However, it performs malicious actions when launched. This can be prevented by cryptographic checksum and binary digital signature.

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