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

Discovering hidden SSIDs

Now, most network administrators think that hiding wireless SSIDs is the most robust step in protecting a network against attacks. But this is not the case because within minutes, an attacker will discover the hidden SSIDs. How does this happen? Now, from the wireless frame architecture, we know that beacon frames contain the wireless SSIDs omitted by the APs. This helps client machines or wireless cards to discover the SSIDs in the network. In a hidden SSID configuration, these beacon frames do not contain the SSIDs, hence only clients who know the SSIDs can connect to it. But this hidden SSID security can be easily bypassed.

To bypass this, we need to wait for a legitimate client to connect to the wireless network. Once the user connects, based on the probe request and response, the hidden SSID will be discovered and will be visible on screen.

Or, during wireless penetration testing, the SSIDs are usually given by the customers, and hence filters using...