Information Security Management, 2nd Edition

3.4 Some Specific Attack Scenarios

In this last section of this chapter, we will look at a few attack examples to see how these unfold. For these, we will focus on a network exploit. We will consider the ICMP, which is connectionless for this example. Two critical features of ICMP are that the protocol does not use any port numbers, and it operates at the network layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack. It was designed this way because it is used for diagnostics, error reporting, and flow control of packets, and not for making connections and carrying on communications. ICMP is also used by the ping and traceroute commands to see if a source is reachable, and (some) of the hops in between, as noted earlier. These commands are helpful in network testing ...