Four Tips to Worsen Your Network Security

If you want to keep your network infrastructure secured, you need to monitor what's going on with routers, switches, and other network devices. Such visibility would enable you to quickly detect and investigate threats to perimeter security, such as unauthorized changes to configurations, suspicious logon attempts, and scanning threats. For example, improper changes of network device configurations will leave your network vulnerable to hackers who could break into your network. If you want to strengthen your network security, never follow these four tips.

Tip # 1: Don’t care about unauthorized logons

Most attempts to log on to a network device are valid actions by network administrators — but some are not. Inability to promptly detect suspicious logon attempts leaves your organization vulnerable to attackers. Unusual events include access by an admin outside of business hours or during holidays, failed logon attempts, or the modification of access rights, etc. An immediate alert about suspicious events enables IT personnel to take action before security is compromised. This practice is also helpful for compliance audits, as it gives evidence that privileged users and their activities on your devices are closely watched (e.g., who is logging in and how often).

Tip # 2: Configure your devices at random

The key threat associated with network devices is improper configuration. A single incorrect change can weaken your perimeter security, raise concerns during regulatory audits and even cause costly system outages that can bring your business down. For example, a firewall misconfiguration can give attackers easy access to your network, which could lead to lasting damage. Visibility into who changed what will provide you with insight and control of your network devices. Continuous auditing would enable you to have better user accountability and detect potential security incidents more quickly before they cause real trouble.

Tip # 3: Ignore scanning threats

Hackers often use network scanning to learn about a network's structure and behavior to execute an attack on the network. If you avoid monitoring of your network devices for scanning threats, you might miss malicious activities until your sensitive data is compromised. To strengthen your protection against scanning threats and minimize the risk of data breaches, ensure continuous monitoring of network devices. Such visibility would enable you to understand which host and subnet were scanned, from which IP address it was initiated, and how many scanning attempts were made.

Tip # 4: Ease control of VPN logons

Virtual private network (VPN) access is a popular way to improve the security of remote connections for many organizations, but there are many security risks associated with it. In reality, VPN connections are usually used by anyone in the organization without any approvals. The best practices recommend providing access to network resources via VPN only after proper approvals and only to users that need access according to their business need. However, practice shows that there are no 100 percent secured VPNs and any VPN connection is a risk. The major risk scenarios include a user connecting via public Wi-Fi (since someone might steal their credentials) or a user who doesn't usually work with VPN suddenly beginning to use it (which can be a sign that a user has lost their device and someone else is trying to log in using it). Visibility into network devices enables you to keep track of each VPN logon attempt. Such visibility also provides information about who tried to access your network devices, the IP address each authentication attempt was made from, and the cause of each failed VPN logon.