Book Image

Network Protocols for Security Professionals

By : Yoram Orzach, Deepanshu Khanna
5 (1)
Book Image

Network Protocols for Security Professionals

5 (1)
By: Yoram Orzach, Deepanshu Khanna

Overview of this book

With the increased demand for computer systems and the ever-evolving internet, network security now plays an even bigger role in securing IT infrastructures against attacks. Equipped with the knowledge of how to find vulnerabilities and infiltrate organizations through their networks, you’ll be able to think like a hacker and safeguard your organization’s network and networking devices. Network Protocols for Security Professionals will show you how. This comprehensive guide gradually increases in complexity, taking you from the basics to advanced concepts. Starting with the structure of data network protocols, devices, and breaches, you’ll become familiar with attacking tools and scripts that take advantage of these breaches. Once you’ve covered the basics, you’ll learn about attacks that target networks and network devices. Your learning journey will get more exciting as you perform eavesdropping, learn data analysis, and use behavior analysis for network forensics. As you progress, you’ll develop a thorough understanding of network protocols and how to use methods and tools you learned in the previous parts to attack and protect these protocols. By the end of this network security book, you’ll be well versed in network protocol security and security countermeasures to protect network protocols.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Part 1: Protecting the Network – Technologies, Protocols, Vulnerabilities, and Tools
7
Part 2: Network, Network Devices, and Traffic Analysis-Based Attacks
12
Part 3: Network Protocols – How to Attack and How to Protect

Reconnaissance and information gathering

Reconnaissance and information gathering are the acts of learning the network structure and resources in order to prepare to attack them. There are several methods that can be used in order to learn a network structure.

The first and most simple one is to simply listen. Let's explore how we can do it.

Listening to network broadcasts

When you are connected to a port switch, and that could be when you physically connect to a network or you take control of a network device and install a capture tool on it, you will be able to view all of the broadcasts sent and received by this device and others. Let's view some examples of broadcasts that we can learn from.

In Figure 6.1, we can observe some typical Wireshark capture files from which we can learn several things about the network. First, we can see Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) updates, and the interesting thing is that the root bridge has a default priority of 32768.

Important...