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.
Understanding Access Control Lists is an important role for moving up into the CCNA area. ACLs can get confusing and cause network problems if not implemented correctly. I think what I outlined below explains in a nutshell of what you can expect from ACLs.
IPv4 maybe on its last leg with only a few blocks of IPv4 addresses available, computer estimates say that the IANA address depletion was January 27, 2011. Also the calculations for all central IPv4 pool addresses will be depleted by July 25, 2012.
While reading the Cisco Annual Report they came up with seven common social engineering attacks that cybercriminals use. Now these types of attacks are common and are not unheard of. You should be familiar with most if not all these weaknesses that cybercriminals use.
One of the things you do first when setting up a Cisco router in lab environments and production environments is basic router configuration. By having a good understanding of basic router configuration you will have the essential building blocks and be able to apply additional knowledge upon router configuration. This tutorial is assuming that you are in a lab environment, additional security measures for production environments are recommended and are not discussed in this tutorial. Also this tutorial is assuming a terminal emulator session is on and ready. (Hyper-Terminal, Putty, etc).