CISSP Fix

Cryptography is a technique of encrypting and decrypting messages. When the text is encrypted, it is unreadable by humans. When the text is decrypted, it is readable by the humans. The terms used in cryptography are as follows: Plain text: This text can be read by a user. Cipher text: This text can be converted to a non-readable format. Encryption: It is the process of creating a cipher text from a plain text. Decryption: It is the process of converting a cipher text to a plain text. Cipher: It is an algorithm that is used to encrypt and decrypt text. Key: Keys are the elements that are used in the technology of encrypting and decrypting text. For more information read Cryptographic attack

Its not too long when security professionals needed the system to redefine the security checking methods in corporate world. Its very difficult to compete with the whole Black hat army with bare hands. “Survivial of the fittest” to make new world security evolves in penetration testing.

First question flash in our mind is What on Earth is this Penetration testing?

It is basically a process of attacking on a system. Lets take an example:

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announces the official approval of the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) certification program as a new baseline skills requirement for U.S.cyber defenders. Specifically, the new Certified Ethical Hacker program is required for the DoD’s computer network defenders (CND’s), a specialized personnel classification within the DoD’s information assurance workforce.

The Certified Ethical Hacker requirement falls under the auspices of DoD Directive 8570 Information Assurance Workforce Improvement Program. The current version (incorporating Change 2) was signed by Assistant Secretary of Defense, John G. Grimes and was officially instated on February 25, 2010. Directive 8570 provides clear guidance to information assurance training, certification and workforce management across all components of the DoD.

The access router is the common name of the exterior router present in the screened host firewall architecture. It is attached to the perimeter network and the internet. Access router is used to protect both the perimeter network and the internal network from the Internet. It allows anything that is outbound from the perimeter network. Access router seldom do packet filtering. The rules for packet filtering, which is used to protect internal machines are always same on both the interior router and the exterior router.

Hackers usually use social engineering to gain most of their knowledge. Social Engineering is the act of getting someone to tell you about sensitive information through trust. This unadulterated trust becomes a weakness for most companies.

Brute Force, Exploit and dictionary attacks are usually started through the use of software on the hacker’s computer. To avoid detection, the hacker’s may use proxies or zombie machines so that their location cannot be determined. This is just a small list of the different attacks hackers can use.

A demilitarized zone (DMZ) is a physical or logical sub-network that contains and exposes external services of an organization to a larger network, usually the Internet. The purpose of a DMZ is to add an additional layer of security to an organization’s Local Area Network (LAN); an external attacker only has access to equipment in the DMZ, rather than the whole of the network. Hosts in the DMZ have limited connectivity to specific hosts in the internal network, though communication with other hosts in the DMZ and to the external network is allowed. This allows hosts in the DMZ to provide services to both the internal and external network, while an intervening firewall controls the traffic between the DMZ servers and the internal network clients.

The IEEE 802.1X standard defines a method of authenticating and authorizing users to connect to an IEEE 802 LAN. It blocks users from accessing the network on the failure of authentication. IEEE 802.1X supports the Extensible Authentication Protocol-Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS) and Protected EAP-Microsoft Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol version 2 (PEAP-MS-CHAP v2) protocols. In the IEEE802.1X authentication system, an access point receives a connection request from a wireless client and forwards the request to the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server then uses the Active Directory database to determine whether the client should be granted access to the network.

Wireshark is an open source protocol analyzer that can capture traffic in real time. Wireshark is a free packet sniffer computer application. It is used for network troubleshooting, analysis, software and communications protocol development, and education. Wireshark is very similar to tcpdump, but it has a graphical front-end, and many more information sorting and filtering options. It allows the user to see all traffic being passed over the network (usually an Ethernet network but support is being added for others) by putting the network interface into promiscuous mode.

The in-session phishing attack is a daily day hoax. This attack exploits the trust of a trusted site by intruding in mid-session in the form of a pop-up message. “Your session has timed out, please log on again” or “please reset your password” is what it might state. Since it appears to be originating from the trusted site, the victim complies, sending login credentials not to the trusted server but to the bad guys.

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Wireless networks today are the real needs of the business and technology world as it provides the interconnection between computers without any wires. The bottleneck of location and wires ,costs are all eliminated by the wireless technology. The wireless network setup concept is very much similar to that of a wired network where instead of the wires only wirelessly connections are made through wave spectrum.

It is a fairly simple setup. The Internet connection comes in from your provider and is connected to a wireless access point or router which broadcasts the signal. You connect wireless antenna network cards to your computers to receive that signal and talk back to the wireless access point and you are in business.