Network Security Assessment: Know Your Network

How secure is your network? The best way to find out is to attack it. Network Security Assessment provides you with the tricks and tools professional security consultants use to identify and assess risks in Internet-based networks-the same penetration testing model they use to secure government, military, and commercial networks. With this book, you can adopt, refine, and reuse this testing model to design and deploy networks that are hardened and immune from attack.

Network Security Assessment demonstrates how a determined attacker scours Internet-based networks in search of vulnerable components, from the network to the application level. This new edition is up-to-date on the latest hacking techniques, but rather than focus on individual issues, it looks at the bigger picture by grouping and analyzing threats at a high-level. By grouping threats in this way, you learn to create defensive strategies against entire attack categories, providing protection now and into the future.

Network Security Assessment helps you assess:

• Web services, including Microsoft IIS, Apache, Tomcat, and subsystems such as OpenSSL, Microsoft FrontPage, and Outlook Web Access (OWA)



• Web application technologies, including ASP, JSP, PHP, middleware, and backend databases such as MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server



• Microsoft Windows networking components, including RPC, NetBIOS, and CIFS services



• SMTP, POP3, and IMAP email services



• IP services that provide secure inbound network access, including IPsec, Microsoft PPTP, and SSL VPNs



• Unix RPC services on Linux, Solaris, IRIX, and other platforms



• Various types of application-level vulnerabilities that hacker tools and scripts exploit

Assessment is the first step any organization should take to start managing information risks correctly. With techniques to identify and assess risks in line with CESG CHECK and NSA IAM government standards, Network Security Assessment gives you a precise method to do just that.

Chris McNab is the technical director of Matta, a vendor-independent security consulting outfit based in the United Kingdom. Since 2000, Chris has presented and run applied hacking courses across Europe, training a large number of financial, retail, and government clients in practical attack and penetration techniques, so that they can assess and protect their own networks effectively.

Chris speaks at a number of security conferences and seminars, and is routinely called to comment on security events and other breaking news. He has appeared on television and radio stations in the UK (including BBC 1 and Radio 4), and in a number of publications and computing magazines.

Responsible for the provision of security assessment services at Matta, Chris and his team undertake Internet-based, internal, application, and wireless security assessment work, providing clients with practical and sound technical advice relating to secure network design and hardening strategies. Chris boasts a 100% success rate when compromising the networks of multinational corporations and financial services companies over the last five years.