Common Networking Attacks Threats and Solution

Common Networking Threats

1. DOS(Denial of Service) attack

2. Password attack

3. IP Spoofing

Solutions

1. DOS attack

As the name suggests, DOS attacks denies authorized people from using a service by using up system       resources. DOS attackers target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks and credit card companies. One method involves over flooding the target machine with external communication requests.

When the DOS Attacker sends many packets of information and requests to a single network adapter, each computer in the network would experience effects from the DOS attack. Threat of DOS attacks can be reduced by three methods- anti spoof features, anti-DOS features and traffic rate limiting.

2. Password attack

There are several different methods of password attack- brute force,dictionary, Trojan horse programs, IP spoofing and packet sniffers. For example L0phtCrack can take the hashes of passwords and generate the clear text passwords from them. Passwords are computed using two different methods which are dictionary cracking and and brute force computation. Some solutions would be to not allow users to use the same password on multiple systems, disabling accounts after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts and also using strong passwords where the passwords are at least eight characters long, contains both uppercase and lower case characters and contains numbers and characters.

3. IP Spoofing

IP Spoofing occurs when a hacker inside or outside a network impersonates the conversation of a trusted computer. IP Spoofing is done to insert malicious data or commands into an existing stream of data. The two general techniques are, a hacker uses an IP address that is within the range of trusted IP addresses and a hacker uses an authorized external IP address that is trusted. To reduce the occurrence of IP Spoofing, proper configuration of your access control is the most important.  You can also prevent users of your network from spoofing other networks  and be a good network citizen by preventing any outbound traffic on your network that does not have a source adress in your organization's own IP range.

References 
http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/computer/34952/today-10-most-common-security-threats-on-the-net 
http://ayurveda.hubpages.com/hub/Types-of-Network-Attacks