Protecting Confidential

Information

Confidential information can reside in two states on a network. It can reside on physical storage media, such as a hard drive or memory, or it can reside in transit across the physical network wire in the form of packets. These two information states present multiple opportunities for attacks from users on your internal network, as well as those users on the Internet. We are primarily concerned with the second state, which involves network security issues. The following are five common methods of attack that present opportunities to compromise the information on your network:

• Network packet sniffers
• IP spoofing
• Password attacks
• Distribution of sensitive internal information to external sources
• Man-in-the-middle attacks

When protecting your information from these attacks, your concern is to prevent the theft, destruction, corruption, and introduction of information that can cause irreparable damage to sensitive and confidential data. This section describes these common methods of attack and provides examples of how your information can be compromised.