For any security engineer or administrator, one of the things that they can’t get enough of is information. On many security appliances, this is provided via an internal logging buffer and other configurable logging servers (Syslog, SNMP). Once they are set up, the question becomes this: What is the appliance filling the log with? With too […]
In the modern world, almost every business is connected to the Internet, and with this connection comes a giant potential security risk to the company. While it is possible for a business to not be on the Internet, very few have chosen to stay disconnected for a number of reasons.One of the main threats that […]
With many modern data networks being used for not only data communications but also voice and video traffic, it is very important that the security appliances that are installed have an awareness of these types of protocols and can easily be configured to support both simple and complex voice and video configurations. This article takes […]
Often one of the least redundant parts of a network is the first hop between a host and the rest of the network; this is because they are typically configured with a default gateway IP address that links to a single device. Should this device fail, then all of the users who are on a […]
Once you’ve had the ability to read the first article in this series or if you have previous knowledge of Cisco’s Hot Standby Redundancy Protocol (HSRP), you should then read this article. This article takes the concepts that were covered in the initial article and offers a little more information about how the HSRP devices […]
This article discusses Cisco IOS image types and provides methods to ensure that the images are complete and have not been modified. It also briefly covers digital signatures that are possible with newer Cisco hardware. Overview The previous article talked about the different Cisco IOS image types, the image file-naming structure, and the different ways […]
Cisco network engineers should know how to correctly perform a router image update/upgrade. This article covers the different image types that exist on most Cisco equipment, Cisco’s image-naming structure, and how to perform image updates/upgrades. Overview An important skill for Cisco network engineers to have is the ability to correctly perform an image update/upgrade. Although […]
Version and naming structure used by Cisco for their IOS images is often confusing. Although the naming used for some of the newer devices is changing to a simpler structure, it will be a while before all the different versions are consolidated. This article covers these different releases and aims to give a single location […]
In this article, Sean Wilkins covers some of the common Internet protocol inspection features that can be enabled (or are enabled by default) on the Cisco ASA. Overview When many people think of protocol inspection, they think of a process that reads the data of a packet and inspects it for some amount of wrongdoing. […]
Sean Wilkins review Cisco’s Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) implementation of access control lists (ACL or access list). He also covers ASA access list types, what they control, and a basic review of what the configuration syntax is to use them. Overview For those just getting into the network security arena or into Cisco network security […]
