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

Introducing configuration audits


A configuration audit is an information security procedure where you prepare a baseline configuration, and then compare this with the current configuration to perform a gap analysis, later working on closing those gaps to get as close as possible to the baseline configuration. This process of closing the gaps and achieving a maximum hardened state is called risk or vulnerability mitigation.

Most companies and organizations rely on strong configurations to ensure security in their systems. A well hardened and patched system is a nightmare for a hacker to break into. As many companies opt to move their operations to the cloud, configuration plays a great role in security now more than ever. A simple lapse in a network device, allowing default users to log in, would help a hacker gain access to a whole network in minutes.

A regular application has two major components: the frontend and the backend. The frontend is where the end users access the application as...