BGP

Chapter 7. Security and Integrity of the Network

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

—Edmund Burke

Because your network depends on connections to other networks in order to function, it’s also potentially vulnerable to problems inside remote networks, or even to malicious actions carried out from elsewhere on the Net. This is in addition to the integrity and security threats stemming from within your own network. As soon as you connect your network to the Internet, if not before, you can expect a number of different people to try to gain access to it for a number of different reasons:

Spammers

Spammers are just looking for mail servers they can use to bombard others with their unwanted advertisements. Make sure you have no “open relays” (mail servers that will relay mail from someone outside your network to someone else outside your network), and they’ll go away.

Script kiddies

There are many small programs or scripts floating around the Net that exploit known vulnerabilities in all kinds of hardware, software, and protocols. Some people must love to see what happens if they turn these loose on your network. Script kiddies can be dangerous, because there are a lot of them, and they usually don’t understand the programs they’re using. Make sure you are aware of all the potential vulnerabilities for every piece of hardware that is connected to the network and all the software that runs on it. Script kiddies are often easily provoked by derogatory ...