A critical study of counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems

Abstract

The security in computer networks is a rapidly growing area of concern. Most of the valuable information resides on the networks, making the network an inevitable entity for survival. All these small networks are connected further to wide area networks which in turn forms the basis of Internet. The Internet is the „world‟s largest collection of networks that reaches universities, government labs, commercial enterprises, and military installations in many countries”. Internet consists primarily of local area networks. The principle method of communication on the Internet is the TCP/IP protocol suite. The Internet, however, is increasingly becoming an environment with multiple protocols. The Internet was an experiment begun in 1968 by the Defense Departments Information Processing Techniques Office to connect computers over a network in order to ensure command and control communications in the event of a nuclear war. The original network was known as the ARPAnet, and the project quickly became a „straight research project without a specific application‟. In the 1980s, the number of local area networks increased significantly and this stimulated rapid growth of interconnections to the ARPAnet and other networks. These networks and interconnections are known today as the Internet. Keeping all this in consideration, it is proposed to design and develop a proactive network surveillance framework. This Framework aims to provide learning vision to the network attacks. The main objective of this research is to bring improved network security through: --Exploring and analyzing various exploit and their detrimental effects on network security, --exploring various honeypots and analyze their working, --development of a proactive network surveillance framework, --creating a bootable enhanced Linux distribution with security scripts and tools (built during this work) to analyze and enhance security, --deployment and testing of the framework,--Learning and monitoring network in real time.