Ashford University Week 5 Implementation of Security in Networking Discussion
Discussion - Due : 03/04Prior to beginning work on this interactive assignment, review Chapter 10 in the textbook, and review any relevant information in this week’s lecture. Access the MISM Credible Resource Guide for assistance with finding additional sources and information on this topic. For this interactive assignment access your virtual lab environment and follow the instructions provided within the lab.As a network administrator of a company, you are faced with many networking problems that occur on a daily basis. Having an arsenal of tools and the knowledge to use them as part of your troubleshooting effort is critical. The following are common network troubleshooting commands. Be aware that many of these have useful switches that expand the command’s capabilities.IPConfigTracertPingNslookupGetMacNetstatTasklistTaskkillNetshNetuseDnslookupArpRouteShutdownWithin your virtual lab environment you will follow the instructions provided. In the virtual lab, create a PDF with a screenshot of each complete step of the instructions. (Be sure to include two screenshots per page in your PDF.) Once you have completed the exercise within the virtual lab, download the PDF and attach it to your initial post.In the body of your initial post, provide an explanation of each command. Using what you completed in the virtual lab, provide examples or use scenarios that demonstrate where or how each of the commands can be used when troubleshooting network problems.Your initial post should be a minimum of 350 wordsAssignment - Due 03/08Security in NetworkingPrior to beginning work on this assignment read Chapter 3 in the textbook, the Granville (Links to an external site.) (2015) and Iglaur (Links to an external site.) (2015) online articles, and review any relevant information in this week’s lecture.It has become common to hear about data breaches and cyberattacks on companies, institutions, and governments.For this assignment, research a recent data breach or cyber attack on a company, institution, or government. Once you have chosen your data breach, research a minimum of two professional sources on this topic. (Access the MISM Credible Resource Guide for assistance with finding appropriate credible professional resources.)In your paper, evaluate the telecommunication and network practices that were in place and describe what contributed to the security breach including the vulnerability exploited. Apply telecommunication and network technical knowledge to create a plan of action that will alleviate these contributing factors. Explain a minimum of three preventive measures that will help to avoid this situation in the future. Support your recommendations with evidence from at least two professional sources. Apply standard principles of design to the implementation of your action plan by outlining the steps the organization would use to execute the action plan.The assignmentMust be two to three double-spaced pages in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA styleWeekly Lecture:As a network administrator, you will face multiple networking issues. Part of your job is to troubleshoot these issues by identifying the problem, and fixing it in a prompt manner. There are multiple networking tools that can help achieve this. In a typical computer networking environment, there are command line prompts that we can leverage for troubleshooting. The following is just a sample of what is available: ipconfig, tracert, and ping.Ping Ping is a network command to quickly test if a host/device is reachable. The format is very simple:Ping IP address (or DNS)For example, let’s assume we want to verify if we can reach Google’s website, Google.com. So we launch a command line prompt, and type:Ping google.comThis will return information that looks similar to this:What ping does is send, by default, four requests to the destination. Each request is made up of 32 bytes, so it’s a very small request. Then we see the result of each of the four requests, which includes the time it took to send the request and receive the reply. This is followed by statistical information, and in the case above, we sent four packets, and received four so we lost 0 of them, or 0% loss. Finally, it gives us the min, max, and average times of the request/response. As you can see, ping is a quick and helpful way to see if a resource is available and reachable.However, some companies turn off this service on purpose to evade any malicious attacks. There is a common attack called the Ping of Death. Since you now understand with how ping works, a hacker can use this to cripple a server. Instead of sending just one ping request, the attacker would flood the server with millions of ping requests, and each request would be larger than the default 32 byte since that is controllable/configurable as well. When the server receives each request, the server is built to reply to each request. However, the server has its limitations, and once that’s reached, the server will crash. Hence the name, the ping of death, and a reason some organizations turn off the service.TracertAnother helpful tool is the command tracert. It’s short for trace route. This command helps us to see the path a request has to travel to get to the destination. In essence, we see the hops from one router to the other. Using Google.com as the example, here’s what one might see after typing the following in a command line prompt:Tracert google.comThis command shows us the different routers it passes through to make it to the final destination. This is a good utility to use in addition to ping to see where a request is failing along the way.IPConfigIpconfig is a great command that can provide us with a wealth of information. For example, it provides us with basic information including the IP address of the machine you are on, the subnet mask, and default gateway. However, it’s often more helpful to retrieve additional information by expanding on this command. By using the following command, all available information parameters for IPConfig will be retrieved:Ipconfig /allThe above screen shows the physical address of the specific network adapter. Remember, there can be multiple network cards in one machine, each with its own unique numbers. The information above also displays the IP address, default gateway, DHCP server, as well as the DNS servers used.This is very helpful information to have and use during a network troubleshooting session. For example, assume you’re the network administrator at your company. Jane, a business user calls you up, and explains she can’t reach any web sites from her computer. You remote connect into her machine, run a simple ping google.com command, and the results indicate that the machine you want to reach is not accessible.You are certain that Google is accessible because you can launch the web page from your own machine. The next thing you try is to reach your company’s public web site from Jane’s machine. That also fails. And since you know one of the IP addresses of your company’s public web site, you try to ping the IP address, which returns a 100% response rate.Therefore, it sounds like a DNS (directory name server) problem – without the appropriate DNS servers to use for URL to IP translation, URLs cannot be routed. You have a few options to try from here, but it’s always a best practice to look at the computer’s networking information through the ipconfig /all command. From the information provided, you notice that the DNS servers are not the right ones. So, the problem was indeed a DNS server issue for that particular computer. Once you set the computer to use the proper DNS servers, you test the connection to different web sites, and they all load correctly.