Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By : Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar
Book Image

Securing Network Infrastructure

By: Sairam Jetty, Sagar Rahalkar

Overview of this book

Digitization drives technology today, which is why it’s so important for organizations to design security mechanisms for their network infrastructures. Analyzing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to secure your network infrastructure. This Learning Path begins by introducing you to the various concepts of network security assessment, workflows, and architectures. You will learn to employ open source tools to perform both active and passive network scanning and use these results to analyze and design a threat model for network security. With a firm understanding of the basics, you will then explore how to use Nessus and Nmap to scan your network for vulnerabilities and open ports and gain back door entry into a network. As you progress through the chapters, you will gain insights into how to carry out various key scanning tasks, including firewall detection, OS detection, and access management to detect vulnerabilities in your network. By the end of this Learning Path, you will be familiar with the tools you need for network scanning and techniques for vulnerability scanning and network protection. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt books: •Network Scanning Cookbook by Sairam Jetty •Network Vulnerability Assessment by Sagar Rahalkar
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Understanding the need for security assessments


Many organizations invest substantial amounts of time and cost in designing and implementing various security controls. Some even deploy multi-layered controls following the principle of defense-in-depth. Implementing strong security controls is certainly required; however, it's equally important to test if the controls deployed are indeed working as expected.

For example, an organization may choose to deploy the latest and best in the class firewall to protect its perimeters. The firewall administrator somehow misconfigures the rules. So however good the firewall may be, if it's not configured properly, it's still going to allow bad traffic in. In this case, a thorough testing and/or review of firewall rules would have helped identify and eliminate unwanted rules and retain the required ones.

Whenever a new system is developed, it strictly and vigorously undergoes quality assurance (QA) testing. This is to ensure that the newly developed system...