It286 Unit 2

Unit 2 Assignment

David Harrigfeld

Kaplan University

IT286-02

Professor Kardauskas

13 March 2012

Part I

A Denial of Service (DoS) attack is a type of attack that floods a system with packets of information to the point where the server either crashes or freezes up. Some of the most popular types of DoS attacks are the Ping of Death, SYN Flood attack, Smurf attack, and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). “The Ping of Death is a large ICMP packet. The target receives the ping in fragments and starts reassembling the packet. However, due to the size of the packet once it is reassembled, it is too big for the buffer and overflows it. This causes unpredictable results, such as reboots or system hangs.” ("The hack faq:," ) The SYN Flood attack sends TCP connection request to a computer faster than it can process them. The Smurf attack uses IP spoofing to confuse the network. “A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.” ("What is a," 2001) It is very hard to protect against any of these attacks but not impossible. By upgrading your system and making sure that all the latest patches are installed and also having a firewall it will keep the risk of being a victim of a DoS attack relatively low.

Part II

The four primary area of security topology includes design goals, security zones, technologies, and business requirements.

Design goals are used to “identify who is responsible for the various aspects of computer security.” (Dulaney, 2009) Design goals deal with confidentiality, integrity, availability, and accountability. Confidentiality is used to keep sensitive information from falling into the wrong hands. Integrity makes sure that the data being used is...