12 February, 2008
30 July, 2007
The latest episode of LiveSecurity’s monthly podcast, Radio Free Security, is now available for download from WatchGuard’s web site or from iTunes.
In honor of Black Hat, the globally renowned security conference taking place in Las Vegas this coming week, Radio Free Security leaves its normal format at home to let highly qualified guests lead the discussion:
FREMONT, Calif., June 27 PRNewswire-FirstCall — AltiGen(R) Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATGN) a leader and market innovator in VoIP business phone systems and call center solutions is pleased to announce that Everyday Edisons, a reality based television show airing on Public Broadcast System (PBS) television, has selected AltiGen‘s MAX1000 VoIP phone system to provide communication services on and off the camera.
Everyday Edisons, a Bouncing Brain production, documents the development process of 14 inventions and the parallel stories of the people who invented them. Selected from thousands of innovative entries, cameras follow the 14 Everyday Edisons as they learn how their extraordinary ideas are taken from a sketch on a napkin to the store shelf. The inventors provide the idea and the show provides a SWAT team of experts to help them commercialize and market that product idea.
Looking for a VoIP phone system to run the production office and to participate on the show, the producers chose AltiGen‘s MAX1000 phone system because they needed a simple to manage, reliable system that offered call center capabilities, a rich feature set of mobility options and the ability to dynamically scale quickly.
“As an inventor’s product ramps up on the show, we needed the ability to quickly and efficiently allocate phone system resources”, said Everyday Edisons’ Creator & Executive Producer
Louis Foreman. “The ability to add additional call center workgroups and to dynamically assign agents on the fly as a product is ramped up is critical to the success of a particular invention.”
In Part 1 of this series, we introduced you to network scanners in general, and an excellent free one in particular, Nmap. You also learned how to obtain and install Nmap. Here in Part 2, you’ll use Nmap to find out how many devices are active on your network. In Part 3, tomorrow, you’ll try your first network scan, and we’ll explain how to interpret the results.
This series assumes you have mastered basic concepts of networking, but do not have a lot of experience managing network security. To understand what follows, you should have a working grasp of IP addresses, subnet masks, and slash notation.
If you’re going to scan your whole network at once — and you are! — you need to know your network IP address, a single address that represents your entire network..
You can learn your network IP address easily using the command line. If you don’t have your DOS prompt open, access it now (and if you don’t know how to, refer to the last paragraphs of Part 1). At the blinking prompt, type ipconfig and press Enter. Your results will differ from ours in the details, but will look generally like this:
C:\Program Files\Nmap>ipconfig
Windows IP Configuration
Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection 3:
Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Ready to see your network the way an attacker sees it?
This short series is for the network administrator who has a grasp of networking, but knows less about security. You might be the Natalie in Natalie’s Graphic Design, or the all-in-one IT department / PC help desk / Webmaster. Maybe you haven’t used command line tools before. But if your network has more than nine devices, you can no longer hold your network in your head. You need a way to quickly and reliably find out:
Answering these questions is known as enumeration, or mapping your network. Enumeration is the first thing a savvy attacker does when trying to take over your network — so you might as well beat ‘em to the punch. Enumerating your network helps you identify and close unnecessary services, improving your security. It also tells you what kinds of OS and applications you’re running, so that you can keep up with the proper security patches.
Enter the port scanner, a special network-mapping tool that quickly and easily answers all three of these questions for you. Port scanners come in many flavors and prices, but in essence, a scanner sends an avalanche of packets to an IP address (or IP addresses) in order to learn which IPs are active, what ports each IP listens on, and (in some cases) what OS each IP uses. Then the scanner reports the results to you.
Nmap, short for Network Mapper, is one of the most popular and powerful port scanners on the market. Fyodor, a well-respected white hat hacker, originally created Nmap. Since its inception, many security experts have built upon Fyodor’s open source tool, making it one of the most powerful and advanced port scanners around.
So how much does all this technology and power cost you? Nothing. All you need is the courage to download and install it… and a little bit of know-how, which we intend to provide in this three-part series.