Modern Day Attacks Against Firewalls and Virtual Private Networks

Electronic technology is growing at a rapid rate; more devices are made mobile and wireless, but with those improvement and developments come flaws and malicious opportunities. Cyber attacks are on the rise and no system or device is immune. Many organizations employ multiple layers of firewalls but that doesn’t completely eliminate the threat. Attacks against firewalls and virtual private networks or VPNs are constantly being exploited with new methods everyday, but they are yet another obstacle that a cyber criminal must overcome. First let’s discuss what a firewall is and what a firewall is capable of doing. Firewall applications are …show more content…

Today, technology continues to advance at such a rapid rate that it becomes more and more difficult everyday to ward off the malicious threats created and attempted daily. Some of these threats developed can be targeted to specific individuals or machines and others can be targeted at large businesses and organizations. There are also malicious threats that aim to attack a large amount of systems in order to use all infected systems for a distributed attack. Never the less firewalls and VPNs are often the first line of defense therefore the first line of attack. Cyber threat actors can use a number of attacks to achieve their goals. Grimes in a 2002 article described a few of these methods, such as Port Scans, where system ports are scanned to detect which ports are available to send traffic through. Each one of these ports are designed for specific services and therefore giving an attacker an idea of what type of attack can be launched and how to access the system. Another method used would be Network Traffic floods, which is accomplished similar to Denial of service attacks where a system is overwhelmed or flooded with traffic. This method has been known to get through firewalls. The last method I will address from his article is called IP spoofing, which is