Penetration Testing and Network Defense

Chapter 10. Attacking the Network

Network: Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections.

—Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language (1755)

Network administrators have to be concerned with a lot more than just protecting their servers. They also need to put safeguards in place to protect a number of networked devices, including firewalls, intrusion detection systems (IDSs), routers, and switches.

This chapter discusses tools and techniques to penetrate past these network devices. It concludes with a discussion on how to secure your network from the types of attacks mentioned in this chapter.

Bypassing Firewalls

A firewall is a security buffer between two or more networks. Firewalls ...