Threats and Vulnerabilities of a Networking System: Vulnerabilities

Earlier article: Threats of a Networking System

The modern day business uses advanced trailblazing security appliances to keep the cyber devils from invading the business systems and processes. These appliances basically set a security perimeter around your system and prevent you from the devils that come through the network to hurt your system.

That's how we defend against a threat. But, what if the devil is actually inside the security perimeter?

Threats can be avoided. However, there are some other limitations, like the one we discussed above, which are inherent in nature yet just as fatal to the system. These limitations are called vulnerabilities of a networking system and that's what we shall be discussing in this article.

Being vulnerable practically means having a weak position or flaw which other people can benefit from.

Vulnerability is an inherent weakness in the design, configuration, or implementation of a network or system that exposes the system to threats. We have discussed in detail about the threats in our earlier article, link is in the top of the article in case you were wondering.

Like I said, if you want to fight a dragon, you must first learn how many ways the dragon can fight you back. That's how the world runs, and that's how we run too.

If we can carefully understand the flaws of our networking system aka Vulnerabilities and work on them pronto, we may not have to perform an exorcism on our servers.

So, let's jump straight back to our topic of the day and learn how a vulnerability may affect your networking system.

Software Bugs

Software bugs are so common that users have developed techniques to work around the consequences, and bugs that make saving work necessary every half an hour or crash the computer every so often are considered to be a normal part of computing. For example - buffer overflow, failure to handle exceptional conditions, access validation error, input validation errors are some of the common software flaws.

Timing Windows

This problem may occur when a temporary file is exploited by an intruder to gain access to the file, overwrite important data, and use the file as a gateway for advancing further into the system.

Insecure default configurations

Insecure default configurations occur when vendors use known default passwords to make it as easy as possible for consumers to set up new systems. Unfortunately, most intruders know these passwords and can access systems effortlessly.

Trusting Untrustworthy information

This is usually a problem that affects routers, or those computers that connect one network to another. When routers are not programmed to verify that they are receiving information from a unique host, bogus routers can gain access to systems and do damage.

End users

Generally, users of computer systems are not professionals and are not always security conscious. For example, when the number of passwords of an user increases, user may start writing them down, in the worst case to places from where they are easy to find. In addition to this kind of negligence towards security procedures users do human errors, for example save confidential files to places where they are not properly protected.

So, that's all on threats and vulnerabilities. We shall discuss about the Intrusion Detection System in our next article. Stay tuned for that.

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Thank You.