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Executive Summary

In this particular incident, the initial tip-off led directly to the departmental network containing the compromised hosts. This information is not always so readily available, since IP spoofing can also be used to simulate traffic from machines on many different networks. Such a situation could be handled by repositioning the network monitor on the backbone (at M’ in the diagram, for example), and again examining the source MAC addresses of attack packets (but note that performance is likely to be a concern, with monitors dropping traffic at gigabit speeds).

Our monitor is a Linux system running the Snort lightweight intrusion detection system [3]. Demands on hardware are not very high: we use a redundant Pentium 133-based system with two 10/100Mbit/s network interface cards, 128MB memory and 4GB disk space. This allows us to use one interface to access the console, while the other is dedicated to the RSPAN traffic. It is configured with a minimum number of services running and no user accounts [4].

There’s little doubt that passwords are an inconvenience. Unfortunately they remain the most practical way for most of us to keep our on-line identities to ourselves. Without them, or if you don’t keep them secret, it would be far easier for someone else to masquerade as you, to read and modify any of your information and to take any action in your name.