Chapter 19: Protecting Your Network Flashcards
Spoofing
The process of pretending to be someone or something you are not by placing false information into your packets.
Protocol Abuse
Doing things with a protocol that it wasn’t meant to do, usually to carry out an attack.
Malformed packets
Packets with unwanted information in an attempt to break another system.
Attack Surface
The way that an exploit takes advantage of a vulnerability.
Attack Window
The time frame in which a bad guy can apply an attack surface against a vulnerability before patches are applied to prevent the exploit.
Zero-day Attacks
New attacks using vulnerabilities that haven’t yet been identified or fixed.
ARP Cache Poisoning
Target the ARP caches (storing known IPs and MAC addresses) on hosts and switches
ARP Request
A special broadcast that a sending device sends out if it doesn’t know the destination device’s MAC address.
Dynamic ARP Inspection (DAI)
Tool to prevent ARP poisoning.
DHCP Snooping
Switch process that monitors DHCP traffic, filtering out DHCP messages from untrusted sources.
Typically used to block attacks that use a rogue DHCP server.
Denial of Service (DoS) attack
A targeted attack on a server that provides some form of service on the Internet, with the goal of making that site unable to process any incoming server requests.
Amplification
The aspect of a DoS attack that makes a server do a lot of processing and responding.
Jamming
The process of sending artificial jam signals that effectively prevent any other station on the collision domain from transmitting its data onto the network. (Fixed by switches!)
Distributed DoS (DDoS)
Uses many many computers under the control of a single operator to launch a coordinated attack.
Zombie
A single computer under the control of an operator
Botnet
A group of computers under the control of one operator
Reflection
Requests are sent to normal servers as if they had come from the target server and the responses from the normal servers are reflected to the target server, overwhelming it.
Smurf Attack
A form of DoS attack that sends broadcast pings to the victim
Friendly/Unintentional DoS
Caused by too much legitimate traffic on a server that is too weak to handle it.
Permanent DoS
An attack that damages the targeted machine and renders that machine inoperable. (Also known as phlashing)
Man-in-the-middle
An attacker taps into communications between two systems, intercepting traffic, reading or manipulating it, then sending it on.
Session Hijacking
Tries to intercept a valid computer session to get authentication information.
Packet Sniffing
Intercepting packets
Banner Grabbing
When a malicious user probes a host’s open ports to learn details about running services.