Wireless Network Active Attacks - Essay Example

Jamming a Network: Jamming a network is a crucial problem occurs in the wireless networks. The air in the region of offices is probable stopped up with wireless networks and devices like mobile phones and microwaves. That undetectable traffic jam can cause interference troubles with the Wi-Fi system. Large number of consumer use devices such as microwave ovens, baby monitors, and cordless phones operate on the unregulated 2.4GHz radio frequency. An attacker takes advantage of this and unleash large amount of noise by using these devices and jam the airwaves so that the signal to noise go down, in the result wireless network stop to function.

The best solution to this problem is RF proofing the nearby atmosphere.Unauthorized Access:The use of Wireless technologies is increasing rapidly and Wireless technology is much admired. So companies are exchanging their usual wired networks with wireless - even for non-mobile functions. There have been several warnings from security advisors regarding wireless protocols, Especially for WEP, being disgustingly insecure. Unauthorized access to wireless network can occur from different ways for example, when a user turns on a computer and it latches on to a wireless admittance point from a neighboring company’s overlapping network, the user may not even know that this has occurred.

But, it is a security violate in that proprietary company information is exposed and now there could exist a link from one company to the other. Denial of Service:A denial-of-service attack is an effort to make computer resources unavailable to its intended users. It is the malicious efforts of a persons or number of persons to stop a web site or service from carrying out proficiently or at all. One general way of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communications requests, such that it cannot react to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.

It normally slows down the network performance. For example speed of opening files and closing files slow down. System will also be unable to access any web site. The bandwidth of a router linking the Internet and a local area network may be consumed by DoS. There are also other types of attack that may include a denial of service as a module, but the denial of service may be a part of a larger attack. Illegal utilization of resources may also result in denial of service. For instance, an interloper can use someone’s secret ftp area as a place to store illegal copies of commercial software, overwhelming disk space and generating network traffic.

Man in the Middle:In the man in the middle attack an attacker sits between the client and the server with a packet analyzer. This is the disparity that most people think of when they hear the term man in the middle. There are also many other forms of the man in the middle attacks that exploit the fact that most networks communications do not use a strong form of authentication. Unless both ends of the session frequently verify whom they are talking to, they may very well be communicating with an attacker, not the intended system.

References:1. Brenton, C. & Hunt, C. 2003. Network Security. 2nd Ed. New Delhi: BPB Publications.2. Hossein, B., 2005. The Handbook of Information Security. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.3. L. Blunk & J. Vollbrecht., 1998. PPP Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP). Tech. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).4. Matthew, S. Gast., 2002. 802.11 Wireless Networks: The Definitive Guide: O’Reilly & Associates.5. Vikram, G. Srikanth, K. & Michalis, F., 2002. Denial of Service Attacks at the MAC Layer in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.

Anaheim, CA: Proceedings of 2002 MILCOM Conference.