Related Concepts

• NIC: Network Interface Card, a hardware component that enables a computer or device to connect to a network, allowing communication over wired or wireless connections

• Routing: Process of data traveling through a network

• ISP: Internet Service Provider, a company or organization that provides access to the Internet for individuals, businesses, and other entities

• Public address: Used to identify the device on the Internet, is given by the ISP

• Private address: Used to identify a device amongst other devices

• MAC address: Media Access Control, is a hardware address set by the manufacturer in network interface cards. It's a twelve-character hexadecimal number. The first six characters represent the company that made the network interface, and the last six are unique numbers

• IP address: Internet Protocol address, identifies a host on a network and can't be active simultaneously more than once within the same network. It's formed by 4 octets of bits, each octet represents a number in the range 0-255

• LAN: Local Area Network

• Ping: Ia a way to send ICMP packets to determine the performance of a connection between devices

• SCP: Secure File Copy, transfer files between two computers using the SSH protocol to provide authentication and encryption

• Switch: Device designed to aggregate multiple other networking-capable devices using ethernet. Sends the package only to the intended target, thus reducing network traffic

• Repeaters: Have the same function as the switch but replay the sent information to all devices connected to it

• Router: Connects networks and passes data between them

• Network Address Identifies the start of the actual network

• Host Address: Used to identify a device on the subnet

• Default Gateway: A special address assigned to a device on the network that is capable of sending information to another network

• Encapsulation: The process of data getting added information details as it goes through every layer before getting sent

• De-Encapsulation: Reverse the process of encapsulation for received data

• TLD: Top-level Domain server, lower-level servers whose work is to get requests from DNS servers to manage it. Each TLD is related to an extension such as .com and only manages requests with its own established extension

• Authoritative name servers: Get requests from TLD servers, store DNS records for domains directly, and send a response with the relevant information back to you, allowing connection to the IP address behind the domain requested

• TTL: Time to Live, tells how much time the information of a request stored in the local cache is being considered valid, before asking the answer to the server again

• Port: Constructs used to direct traffic to the right application on a server. There are 65535 ports available on every computer, and the first 1024 of them are well-known, used for specific protocols

• RFC 793: Norm that establishes the right behavior for TCP protocol

• RFC 3912: Norm that establishes the right behavior for WHOIS protocol

• RFC 5322: Norm that establishes the right behavior for SMTP protocol

• Ping Sweep: Send an ICMP packet to each possible IP address for a specified network to map it

• CIDR: Classless Inter-Domain Routing, useful notation for identifying subnets. It takes the IP address and adds a netmask at the final part of the address Ex: In 192.168.34.23/24 the /24 represents the mask 255.255.255.0

• TUN: Abbreviation for TUNnel, simulates a network layer device and operates in layer 3 carrying IP packets

• SSID: Service Set Identifier, the name given to a network to be recognized from other networks nearby

• Firewall: Look deeper into network traffic and identify malicious behavior to block it

  • Network layer: Filters communications based on source and destination IP addresses

  • Transport layer: Filters communications based on source and destination data ports, as well as connection states

  • Application layer: Filter communications based on an application, program, or service

  • Context-Aware layer: Filter communications based on the user, device, role, application type, and threat profile

  • Proxy: Filters web content requests like URLs, domain names, and media types

  • Reverse proxy: Placed in front of web servers, reverse proxy servers protect, hide, offload, and distribute access to web servers

  • NAT: Network Acces Translation, hides or masquerades the private addresses of network hosts

  • Host-Based: Filters ports and system service calls on a single computer operating system

• VPN: Virtual Private Network, technology that establishes a secure connection between a user's device and a remote server by creating a tunnel where data is encrypted

• Antivirus: Uses signatures or behavioral analysis of applications to identify and block malicious code

• NTLM: New Technology Lan Manager, collection of authentication protocols as a challenge-response used to authenticate a client to a resource on an Active Directory domain

• Pivoting: Use an already compromised machine to jump or get access to other machines of the same network

• Tunneling: Consists of encapsulating a network protocol over others to create an information tunnel on a computer network

• NAC: Network Access Control, is a security system that ensures that only authorized and compliant devices are granted access to the network

  • DAC: Discretionary access control, enables users to manage access to their resources by granting resource owners the responsibility of controlling access permissions.

  • MAC: Mandatory access control, determine resource access based on the resource's security level and the user's security level or process requesting access

  • RBAC: Role-based access control, users are assigned roles based on their job responsibilities or other criteria, and each role is granted a set of permissions

• Monitoring: Capturing, analyzing, and interpreting network traffic to identify security threats, performance issues, and suspicious behavior

• Workgroup: Is a LAN peer-to-peer network that can support a maximum of 10 hosts in the same subnet in Windows, and identifies an arbitrary collection of computers and their resources on an SMB network

• LLMNR: Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution, is a network protocol that seeks to resolve computer names and/or domains on a LAN network, without requiring any configuration

• CIFS: Common Internet File System protocol is a cross-platform, transport-independent protocol that provides a mechanism for client systems to use file and print services made available by server systems over a network, considered a specific version of the SMB protocol

• Relay server: An SMTP server that is known, trusted, and verified by all others

• Community strings: Passwords used to determine whether the requested information can be viewed or not