Vulnerability Assessment And Evaluation Of Associated Attacks On Physical And Virtual Networks

There is no system in the 21st century that has no vulnerability. Most networks seem to be very secure because the vulnerabilities in them are yet to be discovered. However, these vulnerabilities decrease in networks that undergo regular checks and upgrade in their directories with embedded security parameters which have cryptographic primitives. Lack of network checks has fashioned various attack vectors in which hackers exploit to break into the security of private, public and even virtual networks. Network attacks such as brute forcing, man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, social engineering and Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) occur as a result of the combinations of several vulnerabilities which are embedded in them. The aim of this paper is to discover vulnerabilities such as weak pass words on networks and to demonstrate some common attacks that are frequently carried out on vulnerable networks which lack strong security primitives. Basic attacks demonstrated in this research were Man-in-the-middle attack, ARP poisoning, DHCP starvation attack and brute forcing. This research was conducted using network attack tools such as Nmap and Ethercap which are attack tools in Kali Linux. The result obtained from the research showed those vulnerabilities on networks ranges from poor embedment of security parameters on networks, opened network ports, weak and unsalted pass words and host of others. The research highlighted that, networks and security protocols should be designed with standard encryption levels and pass words with high entropy of different security strengths be used in accordance to the importance of the information being secured on a network. The research concluded that when strong cryptographic algorithms for key generation such as Diffie-Hellman and Blowfish algorithm for data encryption are rooted in the network either during configuration, the security of data over SSL and HTTPs of such a network can be greatly enhanced and vulnerabilities greatly reduced.