Chapter 3. Threats

Terms you'll need to understand:

• Script kiddies

• Reconnaissance

• Ping sweep

• Port scan

• Target discovery

• Eavesdropping

• Packet sniffer

• Social engineering

• Resource overload

• Distributed denial of service

Techniques you'll need to master:

• Finding threat information

• Analyzing threat types

If nothing could ever go wrong, we wouldn't need to worry about protecting those network assets. But, of course, things do go wrong, and many of those things are related to security threats. In Chapter 2, "Information Assets," we said that you need to be able to identify just what your information assets are, what you need to protect them from, and what tools you might have available to do that joband do it while keeping the network usable by the ordinary user . This is where we look at what you're protecting those information assets from. Cisco breaks out threats by their origin and by their type.