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Threats to Network Security

Network Sniffing

Network sniffing is one of the main threats of the network designed. Network sniffing refers to the actions of monitoring and intercepting network traffic. Network sniffing happens in cases where the information on transit is clear text passwords, plain text, and weakly encrypted (Gunduz & Das, 2020). The solution to network sniffing is restricting sniffing devices from the network. All devices connected to the network must also be monitored to ensure that they are not sniffing devices. Strong encryption mechanisms should be in place.

Spoofing

Spoofing refers to faking the original identity of packets. Spoofed packets are mostly used to hide the identity of denial of service attacks. Spoofed packets furthermore assume the identity of the sources that have access to the private regions of a network. The solutions to spoofing are filtering packets using firewalls. The filtering mechanisms are ingress filtering and egress filtering. Ingress filtering refers to filtering of packets that are from a network that should not be sending packets to the network while egress filtering is the denial of sending of packets outside the network at least those which are not whitelisted.

Denial of Service Attacks

A Denial of Service Attack floods a particular network, device or website with a lot of access requests that cannot be handled at the same time, consequently denying legitimate users from accessing the servers (Kizza, 2013). The best solution against DoS attack is configuring all the devices like firewalls, routers and switches correctly and keeping the operating systems and the applications present on the network up to date with the latest security updates.

Computer Virus

Computer viruses are malicious software that are designed to spread from one computer to another causing damage to the files stored. Computer viruses are often downloaded from certain websites or sent as email attachments. The best solution against computer viruses is using the latest antivirus software and constantly updating them.

References

Gunduz, M. Z., & Das, R. (2020). Cyber-security on smart grid: Threats and potential solutions. Computer Networks, 169, 107094.

Kizza, J. M. (2013). Guide to computer network security (pp. 387-411). Berlin: Springer.