You can agree with me that technology has taken our lives a higher notch. Hats off to all technology gods. Their efforts led to the invention of mobile devices, computers, and the internet. With all these at our disposal, the world has literally morphed into a village where you can connect to a person at the farthest part of the earth in seconds.
However, amidst the blooming technological development, network security has become a big challenge. Mobile phones and computers are basic necessities and are used for several reasons, from storing data to making simple calculations, communication, building applications, and the list is endless.
Despite the importance of these devices, network security threats are on the rise. They include virus attacks, erasing of essential data, hardware damage, and data theft, and so on. In a short while, we will discuss prevalent network security threats and how they can be solved.
What’s a Network?
A network is when several computers are connected via the intranet for use by several users in a given setting, such as an office.
What’s Network Security?
Network security covers a wide range of devices, processes, and technologies. It uses configurations and a set of rules to safeguard the integrity, accessibility, and confidentiality of computer networks and information. It achieves that through the use of hardware technologies and software.
Given the increase in network security threats, every industry must implement network security solutions to avoid becoming prey to cyber threats.
Types of Network Security Threats
Every network is vulnerable to the following threats;
- Denial of Service Error and Distributed Denial of Service
These are the most superior threats and are hard to eliminate. They get launched quickly and tracking them is an uphill task.
How is the attack generated?
It’s simple- an attacker keeps sending several requests to the system beyond what it can handle. The toolkit has made it easy to disturb websites’ availability. In DOS, the program if the attacker creates a connection on the service port to counterfeit the packet’s header details, after which they leave the connection. Now suppose the host can only handle 20 requests each second but receive over 50 requests every second. The fake mass requests will affect the host server and can’t even accept genuine requests, not to mention that they will be unavailable to a genuine user.
Solutions
- Closely monitor the packets to prevent counterfeit packets from entering your server.
- Upgrade security patches on the operating system of your host on time
- Avoid running the server near the last capacity level.
- Unauthorized access
This is a serious threat and can cause you to lose vital data. It happens when an attacker accesses your authorized section and takes sensitive resources.
Security solutions
- Put in place superb authentication schemes.
- Don’t expose your username and password to unreliable sources.
- Prohibit unnecessary access to other parties
- Eavesdropping
This happens when an attacker interrupts data packages transmitted over HTTP (using monitoring software), alters the data, and exploits it to destroy the network. It’s a deadly threat since there are multiple tools referred to as sniffers designed to alter data packages.
Security solutions
- Entertaining an encryption scheme will protect you from eavesdropping. You can use encryption measures such as digital certificates, such as SSL certificates, to block eavesdropping attacks.
- Applying network segmentation
- Implementing Network Access Control to promote your network’s security by evaluating each device’s authenticity before connecting with them.
