Standard Internet Security Risks

Connecting the network to other networks on the Internet exposes your network to potential service interruptions, unauthorized intrusion, and considerable damage. This section discusses such standard network security risks that you must be aware of. Protections against these risks are discussed in "How To Tighten Security".

• Denial of Service Attacks: These attacks disable the system from serving customers and make a service unavailable for the customer. For example, the attacks can flood the network with useless traffic resulting in inability to serve customers. Most often, such attacks could crash the system or just make the system really slow in serving customers.

• Buffer Overrun Exploits: These include exploiting the software weakness to add arbitrary data into a program, which when run as root, may give the exploiter root access to your system. This may also result in a denial of service attack.

• Snooping and Replay Attacks: The snooping attacks involve an intruder listening to traffic between two machines on your network. The traffic may include passing unencrypted passwords back and forth while using telnet, rlogin, or ftp. This might result in an unauthorized individual breaking into your network or reading confidential data.

• IP Spoofing: Attacks based on IP spoofing involve unauthorized access to computers. The intruder listening to your network traffic finds an IP address of a trusted host, and sends messages indicating that the message is coming from that trusted host.

• Internal Exposure: Most network break-ins are the result of a malicious or disgruntled present or former employee misusing access to information or breaking into your network.