Yesterday, (March 3rd 2011) there was a massive DoS attack that hit WordPress.com. Cisco Skill's uses WordPress.com has a hosting provider but is not believed to one of the sites hit. There still is no word on who or why they targeted WordPress.com but goes to show that Denial of Service is still a popular type of attack and although simple to set up they can still bring down enterprise networks.
This is a full install of BackTrack 4 this can be in a virtual machine, dual-boot, or the main OS. So you burned the image that you downloaded from http://www.backtrack-linux.org/ and are ready to go! If not I would recommend you do that first.
Intel announced on Friday (February 25th 2011) the new high speed connector that will coexists with USB 3.0. Apple also announced that it will be appearing first on the MacBook Pros. Thunderbolt known before has Light Peak is a new high-speed PC connection technology.
This tutorial is going to be talking about the TCP protocol. Every time you connect to a website you are using the HTTP protocol, but below that you are also using a TCP protocol. The nature of TCP is to provide error recovery; there are other services or applications that use TCP. HTTP however is a common protocol that is used in online applications. Remember TCP is not the only protocol in the transport layer of the OSI model, there is another called UDP but that's another day. :)
Although using hardware firewalls are an excellent step forward when securing your network. They can cost money and are not cheap to set up and configure. Using CBAC is built-into the Cisco IOS router and helps filter those unwanted protocols that are in your network.
Some things are making news in the wireless world, the IEEE wants another wireless standard in the mix called the 802.11ac, now the fastest standard they have is the 802.11n(speeds up to 300 Mbps), which was recently published in October of 2009.
Auto Secure is useful for small businesses or IT administrators who know how to configure a router with networking protocols, set up IP interfaces, and networks but may not have a strong understanding of router security. Cisco has implemented a script called Auto Secure, which simplifies securing a router by prompting the user with "yes" or "no" questions. Some answers may require additional network-specific details.
When working with IP addresses and subnet masks you need to have an understanding of how binary works. Binary is still used in computers today, when computers use numbers and letters they use them in a binary format. This guide will be going over numbers, and focusing on the IP addresses in how a computer sees that decimal number.
TACACS+ and RADIUS are both used to control access to network resources, but both of these protocols are different in how they operate depending how you want to secure your network. These protocols need to have (AAA) authentication, authorization, and accounting setup on the routers before you can set up these access server protocols.
This guide will go over how to configure RIPv2 on Cisco routers. This guide follows a packet tracer activity that is posted at the end of this tutorial. RIPv2 configuration is pretty simple to understand with really only three required commands to use besides the network command which depends how many networks are connected to your router.