Network Security First-Step, Second Edition

Essentials First: Vulnerability Analysis

This section looks at some of the tools that are freely available to attackers. The fundamental truth this section teaches is that the bad guys have good tools. Previous chapters touched on many of the specific attack tools; however, attackers have a broad toolset with which they can launch multilevel attacks against your network. When an attacker gains a foothold in your network, it is leveraged to exploit another aspect of your network.

Attackers, for example, can, do, and will take advantage of weak authentication and authorization, improper allocations, poor security implementation, shared privileges among users or applications, or even poor employee security habits to gain unauthorized access to critical ...