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Throughout my years in the computer security industry, I have discovered that a disheartening number of people have only been trained to install and manage various security products, and have never been exposed to why those products exist, nor how they really work. Therefore, computer security is often treated as a black art. There are various reasons for this, but I have come to believe that it comes down to two things:
- Disingenuous Marketing: Leading security product vendors want people to believe their products run on "magic foo foo dust", in order to avoid the uncomfortable fact that most of the time they do not actually do what they claim. If people understood how those products work, they would realize their flaws and choose better products.
- Paranoia & insecurity: Security people are a secretive bunch. This may be due to the fact that many security folks came out of three letter agencies who train people to keep their mouths shut. Also, (this may be a bit cinical) I have found that a when network admin who is now responsible for security admits to himself that he knows very little of how things actually work, he fears for his jobs and obfuscates what he does to cover up what he does not know. This plays into various vendor's hands, who then tell the paranoid and scared security manager that if he/she buys the vendor's products, his/her network will be secure since the vendor has the aforementioned "magic foo foo dust".
This site is for those of you who suspect that there is no "magic foo foo dust" and want to understand how various technologies actually work.
Enjoy!
-Vik
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Computer Security Home
The OSI and the TCP/IP Layers
TCP
IP
Network & Application Layer Attacks
Network Layer DoS
Syn Flood
Ack Flood
RESET Attack
FIN Attack
Teardrop Attack
IP Spoofing
Predicting TCP Sequence Numbers
Application Layer Attacks
Buffer Overflows
Trojans
Backdoors
Cross-site Scripting
CGI abuses
Firewalls
Packet Filters
Proxy Firewalls
Circuit Level Proxies
Application Level Proxies
Stateful Inspection Firewalls
Limitations of Firewalls
Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems
Signature Based
Anomaly Based
Statistical Anomaly Based
Protocol Anomaly Based
Host Based IDS (HIDS)
Network Based IDS (NIDS)
Protocol Anomaly Based NIDS
Signature Based NIDS
Web Application Firewalls
Vulnerability Assesment
Host Based Scanner
Network Based Scanner
Web Application Vulnerability Scanner
Content Filters
Encryption
Conclusion
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