Case Study

network security in our company

INTRODUCTION

The main concern for the company’s network security team is protecting our network from unauthorized intrusions from a potential malicious individual or group. Ping sweeps and port scans are two basic tools that potential attackers use to check the vulnerabilities of a specific computer on the network. They are usually used in a one-two punch to see what particular IP addresses give the best opportunity to be attacked. Every large network has been probed, as can be expected, and it’s virtually impossible to stop but there are tools and procedures in place to minimize the potential for a loss of integrity of our computer systems and data.

A ping sweep is s very basic form or beginning to a potential attack. What a ping sweep is “A ping sweep, also called an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) sweep, is a diagnostic technique used in computing to see what range of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses are in use by live hosts, which are usually computers” (Branch, 2012). Basically what this means is someone is outside of the network and sends out “pings” to a range of IP addresses to see which IP addresses are in use by computers. Once an IP address has been identified as being actively used by a computer then a potential attacker can target that IP address to find out what programs, or services, are being used. To determine which services or programs are being used, the potential attacker would use a port scan to determine what is actively running on the target computer. Discovering what services are actively running on a computer will tell a potential attacker what operating system, known as OS fingerprinting (Conklin 2010), the computer is running and the attacker, if skilled, would know what possible vulnerabilities that particular operating system may have.

The responsibility of the network administrators are to ensure the network’s vulnerabilities are minimized, it is impossible to completely eliminate all...