CompTIA Security+: Network Attacks

Introduction

In this book, we're going to discuss network attacks.

There are many different types of threats out there and many of them carry out their attacks over your networks. These attacks include things like denial of service attacks, spoofing, hijacking, replays, transitive attacks, DNS attacks, and ARP poisoning.

Now, before we get into all of those different types

of attacks, it's important for us to do a quick review of the basics of ports and protocols that you learned back in Network+.

After all, the exam is going to focus on particular ports and protocols and how it's best to secure them. So, let's get started with our review of ports and protocols.

Ports and Protocols

In security, one of the most important things is to ensure that you understand what openings you have created in your systems when it comes to computers and networks. Most of these openings are going to be created by ports.

Now, a port is simply a logical communication endpoint that exists on your computer or your server.

For example, if you're running a Web server, you're going to have Port 80 open and listening for inbound requests from your potential visitors.

Now, ports are classified as either inbound or outbound ports. An import is used when your computer or server is listening for a connection. Just as in my earlier example, the Web server has Port 80 open. That's an inbound port.

It's just waiting for somebody to come along and connect to it.

An outbound port, on the other hand, is open by your computer whenever it wants to connect to a server. If my computer is attempting to make a connection to your Web server over port. Well, then my computer is going to open up a random number port such as Port five, two, three, six, three, and it's going to make an outbound request to that Web server.

In addition to being called inbound and outbound ports, the ports are going to be assigned a number. The number can be anywhere between zero and sixty five thousand five hundred and thirty five. But this big range is actually divided into three smaller groups.

The first group is called the well known ports.

This is for any ports that are between zero and one thousand twenty three. These are called well known ports because they're designated by Ianna,