When Boredom Strikes

A neophyte network administrator may have his/her network vulnerable to most any kind of attack if he/she has no knowledge whatsoever on network security. There are plenty of things that could happen to your network. The following are the most common types of network attacks.

Denial of Service Attack (DoS) - An attack against a computer or network that attempts to limit or prevent access to the Internet by flooding it with requests (for a webpage or online resource) or email (causing the email system to overload). Denial of service attacks are usually done by "zombie" clusters, a cluster of computers under the hacker's control by way of malware, which then flood the network with requests.

Trojan - “Trojan horse”; a reference to the story of the Trojan War, a piece of malware (such as a virus program) contained within a legitimate program. The purpose of the Trojan can be wide, but the distribution approach is to attempt to have the user willingly install the host program to gain access to the victim’s computer.

Virus - A computer virus is a type of malicious software that can make copies of itself and infect a computer with or without the user's permission. The effects of such viruses may range from recurring messages in the form of dialog boxes to the deletion of files and may even corrupt the operating system itself.

Password Cracking - may be used with a program, or the more deliberate "brute-force" cracking wherein the attacker manually tries to make repeated random attempts to gain access to the network.

IP Spoofing - The manipulation of Internet packed routing data to impersonate a different machine. This is usually observed in DoS attacks in an effort to conceal the identity of the attacker.

Without the proper training and knowledge, any network administrator could leave his network open to all kinds of attacks.