Week 6 Reading, Article and Question

The reading this week talks about sniffing or “eavesdropping” on the packet information being sent on a network to begin to pick up sensitive information like usernames and passwords that are sent across the network when users are logging in. It clearly states that it is easier to sniff on a hub network rather than a switched network. The reason for this is that the switch allows the transmission of packets to be more direct. Essentially from point A to point B which makes it tougher for someone not on that line to break in. The way around this is by doing a man in the middle style attack where you as the sniffer trick the two communicating to thing your computer is the intended target of the information. It seems to me from the reading that the best ways to protect against sniffing on your network is if you’re running windows across the network you should restrict the apps you allow onto the network to exclude sniffers. The other best defense is encryption.

My question to the class is that the reading sounds like wireless networks are still incredibly easy to do a man in the middle attack over. Is this still the case or has this changed since publication?

The article for the week

http://www.zdnet.com/article/more-regulations-necessary-for-apac-cybersecurity/

This is a call for governments in the asia pacific to create more regulations around cybersecurity especially for financial institutions. What I gathered from the article is that institutions in the asia pacific region are very vulnerable. I included this article because it mentions the wide availability of hacking tools on the internet. I thought this was interesting since some of these same tools might be the ones we are learning about in class, although we use them for ethical purposes.