CompTIA Security+: Securing Networks

By Adil Ahmed

This is the 3rd installed of the CompTIA Security+ examination. This book will cover topics relevant to the exam on Securing Networks. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adil Ahmed
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201024673

Book preview

Introduction

In this book, we're going to talk about securing your wired and wireless networks. We're going to start out with wired network devices, things like switches and routers, and then we'll move into the cabling that helps put all these networks together.

After that, we're going to start talking about wireless networks, and how we can better secure them and all the different types of attacks that exist for wireless networks.

So, it's really important to understand how to secure your networks properly so attackers can't do this to you.

Now, finally, we're going to round out this section by covering other types of wireless technology in addition to Wi-Fi, things like RFID, near-field communications, Bluetooth, satellite communication, GPS, cellular, and others.

So, let's get started.

Securing Network Devices

Network devices include things like switches, routers, firewalls, IDS, IPS, and more. Each of these different devices has its own vulnerabilities that have to be addressed. But for the Security+ exam, we're going to focus on the most common vulnerabilities across all of these different devices.

The first vulnerability we're going to talk about is default accounts. These are accounts that exist on a device straight out of the box when you buy it. So, for example, if you buy a small office, home office wireless access point, like a Linksys or a D-Link, or something like that, it's going to have some accounts already established on it. It might have one like admin or administrator or user, or something of that nature.

All of these default accounts are very easy to figure out and very easy to guess. And so, it's important for you to actually change these names so that they're not something that an attacker can easily guess. And then, all they have to do is guess your password.

Now, this applies to your organizations, as well. You want to make sure that your naming schemes aren't really easy to guess. Unfortunately, though, most organizations are going to use a common naming scheme for all of their users.

For example, most organizations like to use first name dot last name. So, if your name was Adam Ryan, you're [e-mail]. This makes for a great, normal, easy to understand naming scheme. That makes operations very easy.

But it also makes it fairly easy to guess.

Because if I see that [e-mail] is one email, then I can probably guess that Susan.Smith is also there. Or whoever else