The Network Security. Org

To study the proceedings and attacks from hackers, Honeypots are used. The idea thereby is, to put one or more special servers in a network . An aggressor; who cannot differentiate between genuine server/services and honeypots; sooner or later will be taken up the services offered by a Honeypot by his search for a safety gap. All his activities on the honeypot are loged thereby.

This is the fifth and final installment in a series of articles on understanding and developing signatures for network intrusion detection systems. In the previous article, we looked at the topic of protocol analysis, meaning that the intrusion detection system actually understands how various protocols, such as FTP, are supposed to work. We initially looked at protocol analysis as it applied to a single request or response. In this article, we will extend this discussion by looking closely at stateful protocol analysis, which involves performing protocol analysis for an entire connection or session, capturing and storing certain pieces of relevant data seen in the session, and using that data to identify attacks that involve multiple requests and responses.

This is the fourth in a series of articles on understanding and developing signatures for network intrusion detection systems. In part one we discussed the basics of network IDS signatures and then took a closer look at signatures that focus on IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP header values. In the second installment we looked at some signature examples. In the previous article, we began to examine the topic of protocol analysis, which means that the intrusion detection system actually understands how various protocols, such as FTP, are supposed to work. In this article, we will continue to look at protocol analysis and how it can overcome attempts by attackers to obfuscate their exploits so that they cannot be detected by simple intrusion detection signature methods.

This is the third in a series of articles on understanding and developing signatures for network intrusion detection systems. In Part One and Part Two, we examined the use of IP protocol header values, particularly TCP, UDP and ICMP, in network intrusion detection signatures. In this article, we will continue our discussion of signatures by studying the area of protocol analysis, focusing on the examination of values within TCP and UDP payloads. Network intrusion detection using protocol analysis-based signatures is very effective in detecting both known and unknown attacks involving protocols such as DNS, FTP, HTTP and SMTP.

This is the second in a series of articles on understanding and developing signatures for network intrusion detection systems. In the first installment we looked at signature basics, the functions that signatures serve, header values, signature components, and choosing signatures. In this article we will continue our discussion of IP protocol header values in signatures by closely examining some signature examples. Although it may be relatively easy to develop a signature that matches a particular type of traffic, it will likely cause unexpected false positives and false negatives. Signatures must be carefully developed and tested in order to create a signature set that is highly accurate, yet is also as efficient as possible.

This is the first in a series of articles on understanding and developing signatures for network intrusion detection systems. In this article we will discuss the basics of network IDS signatures and then take a closer look at signatures that focus on IP, TCP, UDP and ICMP header values. Such signatures ignore packet payloads and instead look for certain header field values or combinations of values. By learning about network IDS signatures, you?ll have more knowledge of how intrusion detection systems operate, and you?ll have a better foundation to write your own IDS signatures.

In this three-part series of articles, we are presenting recommendations that will help readers to evaluate the quality of network intrusion detection (NID) signatures, either through hands-on testing or through careful consideration of third-party product reviews and comparisons. The first installment discussed some of the basics of evaluating NID signature quality, as well as selecting attacks to be used in testing.

The second installment concluded the discussion of criteria for choosing attacks and provided recommendations for generating attacks and creating a good testing environment. This article will wrap up the series by examining other ways of generating attacks with other security related tools and by manually creating your own attacks.

In this series of articles, we present recommendations that will help readers to evaluate the quality of network intrusion detection (NID) signatures, either through hands-on testing or through careful consideration of third-party product reviews and comparisons. The first installment discussed some of the basics of evaluating NID signature quality, as well selecting attacks to be used in testing. This article will conclude the discussion on criteria for choosing attacks and then provide recommendations for generating attacks and creating a good testing environment. We begin by discussing some methods of acquiring attacks and attack traffic.

In this series of articles, we will present recommendations that will help you to evaluate NID signatures. As you shall see, properly testing NID signatures is a surprisingly complex topic. We will begin by discussing some of the basics of evaluating NID signature quality, and then look at issues relating to selecting attacks to be used in testing. Although you may not necessarily perform hands-on NID testing and evaluations, the information presented in this series of articles will give you the knowledge and the facts to get the most out of published reviews and comparisons of NID signatures.

Note that we assume that the reader is already familiar with the basic concepts and principles of network intrusion detection.

Intrusion detection systems, or IDSs, have become an important component in the Security Officer's toolbox. However, many security experts are still in the dark about IDS, unsure about what IDS tools do, how to use them, or why they must. This article will offer a brief overview of intrusion detection systems, including: a description of what IDSs are, the functions they serve, the two primary types of IDS, and the different methods of intrusion detection that they may employ.

At the tail end of 2005, a computer hacker calling himself "the Persian Fox" began attacking hundreds of U.S. websites, including scores run by animation companies.

"You keep abusing, Islam's almighty Prophet with disgusting and disgraceful cartoons using excuses of freedom of speech" reads the onscreen message (including the misplaced comma) that replaced the sites' regular content.

RFC 792 spelt out the goals and specifications of the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP). Basically, it is used as a means to send error messages for non-transient error conditions and to provide a way to query the network in order to determine the general characteristic of the network.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is not designed to be absolutely reliable. The purpose of the ICMP messages is to provide feedback about problems in the communication environment, not to make IP reliable.

In this article I am trying to explain what DDOS is and how it can be prevented. DDOS happens due to lack of security awareness of the network/server owners. On a daily basis we hear that a particular machine is under DDOS attack or NOC has unplugged the machine due to DDOS attack . So DDOS has become one of the common issues in this electronics world. DDOS is like a disease which doesn't have an antiviral developed. So we should be carefull while dealing with it . Never take it lightly. In this article i am trying to explain the steps/measures which will help us defend from DDOS attack ,up to a certain extend .

Start with the obvious: Are you actually hacked?

1. Look for recently modified or accessed files (Start | search; afind, hfind)

When an intruder copies files onto your computer, the file modified timestamp is changed. A skilled attacker may reset these stamps, but most won?t bother.

Recently, a "Wireless in the Enterprise" reader reported being forced to disable intrusion prevention monitoring within shared, multi tenant locations because the wireless scanning system was generating a confusing abundance of red herrings, or "false positives," from neighboring access points. The thought of anyone forced to turn off security caused my anxiety level to spike.

In this article, we examine the evolution of packet filtering firewalls and their current incarnation as "Deep Inspection" firewalls. We compare the fundamental design philosophies of packet filtering firewalls with proxy gateways, and will conclude with a few historical observations regarding the relative effectiveness of conservative design philosophies when compared to their less rigorous counterparts.

This document outlines suggested steps for determining whether your Windows system has been compromised. System administrators can use this information to look for several types of break-ins. We also encourage you to review all sections of this document and modify your systems to address potential weaknesses.

There was a time when data protection just meant backups. They didn't work all that well, but everybody accepted that as the status quo. Now times have changed with increasingly disastrous effects for companies whose backups fail.

Today, the storage industry is addressing the core problems behind these issues.

Signature Types

Signatures fall into one of the following two basic categories depending on their functionality:

# Atomic signatures
# Stateful signatures

This section examines these signature types in further detail. Furthermore, the triggering mechanisms explained later in this chapter can be used with both of these base signature types. The major distinction between these two base signature types is whether or not the inspection process requires the IPS device to maintain state about previous actions that have been observed.

The old problem of DNS cache poisoning has again reared its ugly head. While some would argue that the domain name system protocol is inherently vulnerable to this style of attack due to the weakness of 16bit transaction IDs, we cannot ignore the immediate threat while waiting for something better to come along. There are new attacks, which make DNS cache poisoning trivial to execute against a large number of nameservers running today. The purpose of this article is to shed light on these new attacks and recommend ways to defend against them.

This research paper presents a technical overview of the technique known as DNS cache snooping. Firstly,
a brief introduction to DNS is made followed by a discussion on common misconceptions regarding DNS sub systems. Then this relatively unknown technique is introduced, followed by a field study to assert the overall exposure of the Internet to this threat.

Also, a set of devised abuse scenarios that rely on cache
snooping is presented. This paper concludes with recommendations on how to reduce exposure to this security vulnerability, including proposed changes to the BIND DNS server implementation.

NFR's Sentivist 4.0, with its Confidence Indexing for assessing threats, ease of use and reporting capabilities, impressed us sufficiently to be named our Hot Pick in November 2004. Sentivist 5.0 takes the product to another level and has again earned the honor. It's suitable for any sized organization, with environment-aware attack assessment, vulnerability scanning, data integration, ad hoc reporting and a revamped interface.

Based on the many responses we got regarding the 'Packetslinger' diary, here a few notes on how to setup a penetration/cracking exercise. As a remark: Laws change from area to area. Whatever you do, check your local laws and regulations. Corporate policies, university ethics guidelines and ISP contracts may have to be consulted.

Also known as dictionary attacks, which uses a list of known passwords, a program will connect to a remote SSH server and attempt to login using common user name/password combinations. Recently there has been surge of these attack attempts noticed by server administrators. This paper will attempt to briefly discuss these attacks, how they work, where they come from and most importantly, possible ways to stop them. This article is targeted towards the novice and intermediate.

I've recently had the opportunity to listen in on a couple of debates regarding firewalls and their utility, as well as their future in the corporate and educational environment.

Now there are two kinds of firewalls ? there is hardware which is most frequently network based, and software firewalls which are generally deployed on local hosts. Network-based firewalls can be considered perimeter or enterprise firewalls since they sit at the gateway to the Internet and inspect packets before allowing ingress or egress. But you know all this already (or you've been pretending that you do).

Snort is an open source packet sniffer and logger that can be used as a lightweight Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to detect a variety of attacks and probes such as buffer overflows, stealth port scans, CGI attacks, SMB probes, and more. The Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases (ACID) displays and reports intrusions and attacks logged in the Snort database in a web browser for easy analysis.

The obvious question to ask is why the heck do I care for Layer 2?

The obvious answer to this is - no matter how secure you make your TCP/IP fortress if a hacker can punch in at any of the layers he has the keys of kingdom. Moreover most of the firewalls are not capable for detecting these kinds of attacks. Also to successfully conduct most of these attacks we have to be on the segment as of the victim.

This document outlines suggested steps for determining whether your Windows system has been compromised. System administrators can use this information to look for several types of break-ins. We also encourage you to review all sections of this document and modify your systems to address potential weaknesses.

This document does not provide intrusion detection methods for Windows 9x (including Windows ME). These operating systems lack the underlying subsystems necessary to secure them and should not be used in a commercial environment or on workstations where data is considered critical.

One of the great mysteries in security management is the modus operandi of criminal hackers. If you don't know how they can attack you, how can you protect yourself from them? Prepare to be enlightened.

This article is not intended to show you how to hack something, but rather to show how attackers can take advantage of your mistakes. This will enable you to avoid the common pitfalls that criminal hackers exploit.

An article on "Security Problems in the TCP/IP Protocol Suite" by S.M.Bellovin in 1989 initially explored IP Spoofing attacks . He described how Robert Morris, creator of the now infamous Internet Worm, figured out how TCP created sequence numbers and forged a TCP packet sequence.

This TCP packet included the destination address of his victim and using as IP spoofing attack Morris was able to obtain root access to his targeted system without a User ID or password.

Like the current Windows Firewall in Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1), the new Windows Firewall is a stateful host-based firewall that allows or blocks network traffic according to its configuration and the applications that are currently running to provide a level of protection from malicious users and programs on a network.

Even if you have sophisticated prevention measures in place, intrusions can happen. In this module, we describe practices to be implemented independent of the size, type, or severity of an intrusion or of the methods used to gain access. The key event is that an intruder has gained access to your systems or data.

You need a strategy for handling intrusions effectively that includes preparation, detection, and response. The practices in this module identify steps you must take to respond to and recover from a detected intrusion.

As the complexity and scope of network threats grow, forward thinking companies are increasingly complementing traditional intrusion detection systems (IDS) with intrusion prevention systems (IPS). IPS technologies are designed to proactively block malicious traffic before it can do damage. Learn more about how IPS solutions should evolve into a systematic approach that pervades every network and business process whether internal or external.

Foundry Networks has just announced a new end-to-end real-time network intrusion detection and prevention solution.

Combining Foundry's IronView Network Manager (INM), the sFlow nework traffic monitor and Snort, an open-source network intrusion prevention and detection system, the solution allows network managers to quickly identify and resolve network intrusions. IronView's feeds sFlow network data, logging packets for every witch and router port on the network to Snort, which can then identify and isolate potential threats for remediation.

The Tolly Group evaluated Symantec Network Security 7160 against the 5 essential pillars needed to be an effective IPS solution:

* Extensive and accurate detection/prevention capabilities
* The ability to withstand common and advanced evasion techniques that are used to render the prevention system useless
* Low latency and high throughput to guarantee network availability
* Easy to deploy and include management features such as automated protection that make the security appliance simple to use
* World-class threat response capabilities to respond to the latest threats and outbreaks

Tests found that it accurately detected and blocked 100 percent of more than 500 network attacks launched against it, and properly detected all suspicious activity, security risks, and audit events it encountered. Engineers noted they were able to deploy, set up, and manage this product in a matter of minutes.

I have attempted to uncover and explore a free and easy solution for the cost conscience small to medium size network to incorporate Intrusion Detection. The paper will focus on the aspects of free tools in relation to Intrusion Detection. I will define the tools I am using, where I will place the tools within the network, why I decided to place the tool in this particular location, and what defense mitigation the tool should assist.

I have chosen three products to use in developing this particular solution for Intrusion Detection. Eagle X as the primary detection mechanism, Ethereal for capturing and reporting detail, and GFI Languard for system integrity or Host Based Intrusion Detection. I will also implement a relationship with two different reporting agencies to assist in the understanding and detection process. These reporting agencies, MyNetwatchman.com and Dshield.org, will provide another level or layer of detection as well as a reporting and escalation process.

IT departments spend a great deal of time, effort and money to protect against external threats ? those that enter the network via the Internet or remote access ? but sometimes forget the harm that can be done by an authorized user who decides to ?go rogue? (circumvent network security policies for his/her own purposes).

Just as retail stores often find that more losses come from employee thefts than from outside shoplifters, some companies might be surprised to learn that they are at least just as much at risk from their internal users as from Internet hackers. Sometimes it?s inadvertent; non-tech savvy users may inadvertently visit Web sites that run malicious code or innocently download programs they think will be useful on the job that contain spyware or click on email attachments that contain viruses or attach their laptops (that have, unbeknownst to them, picked up malicious software from unprotected home or hotel Internet connections) to the company network. They usually don?t realize their actions violate policy or best security practices.

The rogue user, though, knows that he/she is violating network policies and often has some advanced technical knowledge. That doesn?t mean the intent is to bring down the network or introduce an attack. Usually the rogue user just wants to defeat your security mechanisms because they inconvenience him ? but doing so can have unintended consequences that can be devastating to your network.

Network Computing turns in a long feature looking at tools that help troubleshoot and monitor Wi-Fi networks? health by examining the radio frequency space they operate in: The monitoring space is very hot; I?m asked all the time to be briefed on the latest product or product revision. I?ve demurred because Wi-Fi Networking News lacks an RF testing environment. The folks at Network Computing show how to examine the field. They look at a dozen products from several manufacturers, only some of which directly overlap by function.

The reviews sort products into spectrum analyzers, calibration tools (just a single entry), wireless protocol analyzers, site surveying tools, and performance and security evaluators. Spectrum analyzers look at the RF patterns and are typically intended for more sophisticated users and uses; protocol analyzers deconstruct data into known patterns to see how the airspace is being used by data devices. A spectrum tool can show if a microwave oven is disrupting your network or an errant cordless phone, while a protocol tool will let you see how 15 networks on the same channel in a small space are producing throughput degradation.

Trapeze Networks Inc. announced yesterday that it is adding software from intrusion-detection vendor AirDefense to its wireless LAN (WLAN) systems, a move both companies say will help businesses defend against network attacks and rogue access points. Bruce Van Nice, vice president of worldwide marketing for Pleasanton, Calif.-based Trapeze, said the pairing with Alpharetta, Ga.-based AirDefense will give Trapeze customers secure WLANs that are easy to scale and manage. The integration will also help businesses meet regulatory requirements that mandate auditing of WLAN systems to make sure they comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.

The upgrade to Trapeze's Mobility System Software will be out by year's end as part of the company's Open Access Point Initiative. The pricing model is still in the works, Van Nice said.

Learn about the relatively new form security appliances are taking. With the growing need for security and the increased pressures to manage disparate technologies, IT managers are looking for new ways to lessen the burden security measures may make on their day-to-day life. Learn what your peers are doing and are concerned about, as well as some great new products that could make managing security much less daunting.

This IT Briefing will cover:

* Great market research on security
* Market trends
* Shed some light on the growing UTM market

This is an informative look at security and how an integrated approach may save you time and your company money.