Running head: NETWORK SECURITY THREATS 1

Network Security Threats

IT-FP1006 Communication Strategies for the Information Technology Professional

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Capella University

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Network Breach

Wireless network is currently among the most used communication technologies, but

still, the technology encounters drawbacks limiting its efficiency. Wireless network

communication involves data transmission mostly by radio waves from one point to another,

making it vulnerable to attacks. These attacks are passive or active. In active attacks, the contents

of the information are altered and a fake one provided by the attackers while in passive attacks,

the attackers listen to obtain information without altering the contents. One of the wireless

security threats is the denial of service (DoS).

Denial of service is a prominent attack that breaks down the wireless network by sending

huge traffics to access point making it unresponsive (Yuan, Archer, Xu, & Yu, 2008). The

attacker prohibits normalcy usage or management of communication facilities. To break down

the wireless network, denial of service attack utilizes a fake disassociation technique. The client

computer is flooded with a massive amount of disassociation which breaks its connection to

access point. The client computer will make several attempts to establish a connection, but the

attacker keeps sending the disassociation frames to prevent this from happening. The attackers

also use a fake de-authentication technique breaking the wireless network security. The client

computer is flooded with de-authentication frames which prevents it from having an authentic

connection with the access point. The attacker would keep sending the de-authentication frame to

prevent client computer from authentication.

Denial of service attack is generally of two types: crashing service and flooding services.

Crashing attacks feat the vulnerabilities in the system, causing the crashing of the service or

system (Gu & Liu, 2007). Flood attacks result from the system receiving excess traffic, making

them slow down and stopping. The common flood attacks employed are buffer overflow, ICMP
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flood and SYN flood attacks. Denial of service attackers mostly target websites and online

service providers, rendering them non-operational. They achieve this by flooding the server with

massive traffic than what they can handle. The denial of service attack often attacks the client

computer, which is often the workstation, as shown in the diagram below. The work station

consists of laptops and computers.

Figure 1: Corporate Network Diagram

Defense Attack – Denial of Service

Denial of service attacks defense can be categorized differently. The main method being

detection and prevention. This can be achieved using three approaches: by detection of the attack

on the victim end, detection from the attackers end by use of an interconnected detection
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approach. DoS detection can be achieved by leveraging statistics differentiating normal and

abnormal behaviour. Comparison between baseline stated normal information with incoming

traffic would display malicious traffic if there is any (Manavi, 2018). Its approaches are equipped

with an immediate response that tends to mitigate the impact of the attack. Certain methods,

however, are viewed as preventive oriented as they prevent attacks before they occur. System

hardening is one such example, here only patched and necessary services are run by the system

eliminating certain denial of service attacks. Secure software developments that include threat

modelling should be used in the timely determination and addressing the denial of service

attacks. Filtering technique is another way of preventing denial of service attacks; it undertakes

specific heuristics and rules that automatically rejects malicious traffic. However, combining

several approaches for multiple preventions is significant; this provides a more effective and

layered defense.

Policy to Prevent Denial of Service Attack

Network security policies are significant in preventing and mitigating denial of service

attacks on organization websites and servers (Le, Van, & Giang, 2016). One such policy is the

implementation of reverse proxy that points to several servers in a network, which is a replicate

of the services provided. This enables a balanced distribution of request received to other servers

with similar functionalities. Besides, this prevents the server from being overloaded. The website

and online service are also provided with capabilities such as cache memory or failover, which

decreases the time services take to respond.

Practices to Effectively Enforce Security Policy

The security policies serve to prevent or mitigate denial of service attacks on organization

servers. In most companies, the IT department is responsible for security policies

implementation; employees also play a role. Some of the practices that enforce security policies

include:

Proactively monitoring the network traffic from the hosting provider (Lai, Su, Hsiao, &

Chen, 2016). IT experts should always request daily graphs and logs. Whenever there is an

attack, a company can report to its service provider and inquire for the Internet Protocol (IP)

address that is attacking it. Provision of excess bandwidth that will help prevent denial of service

attack. This gives the company ample time to act before resources are overwhelmed. Extra

bandwidth available can accommodate unforeseen surges in a network that could have resulted

from denial of service attack.

The IT experts are required to determine and discover vulnerabilities in application

layers. They are required to know the amount of connection a database can hold whenever there

is an attack. They have to deploy inspection devices on incoming traffic to mitigate forged traffic

when identified. Partnering with internet service providers (ISP) is one of the policies needed to

be taken by IT experts to help prevent and mitigate denial of service attacks. The traffic overload

has to pass through the ISP's network. Thus they always have ways of shunning certain internet

protocol addresses that would reduce the impact of denial of service attack. A relevant example

is an ISP applying a black hole filtering technique to halt unwanted traffic before it allows

passage to the protected network.

Employees are also advised to follow certain security policies to prevent and mitigate

denial of service attacks (Bonguet & Bellaiche, 2017). They are required to use stronger

passwords to prevent attackers from gaining access to the server breaching it with malicious
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traffic. To lower the chances of unauthorized access, companies advise their employees to

change their password after some time and make them more robust by using different

combination. Attackers and hackers take advantages of unsecured WiFi to gain access to the

companies' server. Employees are advised to avoid using this WiFi to access companies network

structure as a policy measure to prevent and mitigate denial of service attacks. Employees are

also encouraged to easily recognize any abnormality in the network structure as a policy measure

to mitigate denial of service attack. The defense of these attacks is dependent on the speed of

recognition of early attacks for an effective response to implement mitigation measures. Stuff

members need to be trained to monitor network activity and server for any abnormality that

indicates denial of service attack.

Characteristics of Denial of Service threat

It is often difficult to distinguish an attack to a network from other networks connectivity

errors. A denial of service threat has unique characteristics that may include (Bhatia, Mohay,

Tickle, & Ahmed, 2011): Lagging network performance, websites tend to respond slowly and

takes so much time in loading websites and online services. This brings about congestion in

service delivery, and clients might prefer other online platforms in undertaking their needs.

Denial of service attack is characterized by the inability to load the certain website, specific links

and hyperlinks failing to load maybe be a clear indication of an attack. Failure to hyperlink will

bring about incomplete operation and risk of loss of important information. Another unique

feature of denial of service threat is the loss of connectivity by devices on the same network.

Devices failing to interconnect within the same network halts the smooth running of a company.

Conclusion
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Wireless communication is a widely used form of communication globally; however, it

faces security drawbacks such as denial of services. Several methods can however, be used to

mitigate this attack. Companies are advised to familiarize their employees and IT experts on

denial of service threat identification by easily using its unique characteristics.

References

Bhatia, S., Mohay, G., Tickle, A., & Ahmed, E. (2011). Parametric differences between a real-

world distributed denial-of-service attack and a flash event. Paper presented at the 2011

Sixth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security.

Bonguet, A., & Bellaiche, M. (2017). A survey of denial-of-service and distributed denial of

service attacks and defenses in cloud computing. Future Internet, 9(3), 43.

Gu, Q., & Liu, P. (2007). Denial of service attacks. Handbook of Computer Networks:

Distributed Networks, Network Planning, Control, Management, and New Trends and

Applications, 3, 454-468.

Lai, S.-F., Su, H.-K., Hsiao, W.-H., & Chen, K.-J. (2016). Design and implementation of cloud

security defense system with software defined networking technologies. Paper presented

at the 2016 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology

Convergence (ICTC).

Le, D.-N., Van, V. N., & Giang, T. T. T. (2016). A New Private Security Policy Approach for

DDoS Attack Defense in NGNs. In Information Systems Design and Intelligent

Applications (pp. 1-10): Springer.

Manavi, M. T. (2018). Defense mechanisms against distributed denial of service attacks: a

survey. Computers & Electrical Engineering, 72, 26-38.

Yuan, X., Archer, R., Xu, J., & Yu, H. (2008). A visualization tool for wireless network attacks.

Journal of Education, Informatics and Cybernetics, 1(3).