Defending Your Network From The Wiley Hacker



New Riders Publishing | English | PDF | 817 Pages | Size: 4.90 MB

Introduction
No matter what field you work in, you cannot help but notice the impact that the Internet has had on society. It has opened up opportunities and markets that people only dreamed of before. As with any new technology, there is always a positive and negative aspect. The positive side is the tremendous business opportunities. The negative side is the huge security risk that is now posed to so many companies, yet few companies are truly aware of the potential danger. It’s like getting in a brand new car and driving down the road at 80mph, only to realize that the engineers did not equip the car with breaks. If this did occur and a large number of people bought the car, the net result would be a high number of fatalities because the proper breaking was not built into the car. The same thing is occurring with the Internet. Now that companies have invested millions of dollars in this new infrastructure, they realize that security was not properly built in, and now their entire companies are vulnerable. The point of this book is that there is no way to properly protect a company’s network unless you know what you’re up against. Only by understanding how attacks work and what an attacker does to compromise a machine can a company position itself so that it can be properly protected. If someone tells you to protect a site against a certain threat and you don’t understand what the threat is or how it works, you cannot protect against it. Knowing what an attacker can do to compromise your system and what that compromise looks like on a network allows you to build a secure system. Although this book goes into techniques used to hack a machine and perform common exploits, it is not meant to be a handbook on how to hack. It is meant to help a company properly close up its vulnerabilities and protect its computers. I want to make you aware of the tools that are available and how easy they are to use, and I want to show you what a company must do to have a secure network.