ETHICAL HACKING NET-185-001N Week 8

This week, I learned more about packet sniffing and certain types of attacks that it facilitates, namely Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) Spoofing and Domain Name System (DNS) Poisoning.  I also used Wireshark to get a look at some of my own traffic browsing the web.  I also remembered to use GRC DNS Benchmark (http://grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm), which lets you find out which DNS servers are the fastest to respond for your particular location.  It runs on Microsoft Windows or using Wine on macOS or GNU/Linux.  Wine is available from several sources, including a commercial version called CrossOver from CodeWeavers at http://codeweavers.com and free from https://www.winehq.org.  I learned a bit about using Snort (http://snort.org), which is useful for avoiding intrusions from individuals attempting to create botnets of internet-of-things devices and such.  If you want to use Snort you should probably look into running pfSense for a router and firewall.  I've previously mentioned DNSCrypt, but it is certainly an appropriate tool to deploy against DNS sniffing.  When combined with Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC), DNS spoofing and sniffing are almost impossible, unless the encryption is broken (which generally would require a quantum computer unless someone was particularly careless setting things up) or a certificate is either stolen or forged by a nation-state or registrar (who are not supposed to do such things).  DNSCrypt is available on all the major platforms, including Android, iOS, GNU/Linux, macOS, BSD, and Microsoft Windows (https://dnscrypt.info).  DNSCrypt creates a VPN tunnel for DNS traffic directly to a DNS server, which prevents intermediate devices from reading the traffic unless they break the encryption.  DNSSEC, on the other hand, only verifies DNS entries and servers are authentic, it does not encrypt the traffic, which means it can still be sniffed, although not spoofed. DNSSEC is adequate for major DNS servers to talk to each other, but doesn't protect user privacy sufficiently on its own, although it is more secure than ordinary unencrypted DNS.

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