With the number of network threats growing at a steady pace, network vulnerabilities and loopholes often find a way into your network infrastructure, causing irreversible damage in certain cases. To prevent seeing your organization in a similar position, it is vital to analyze your network thoroughly and ensure it is free from security breaches.
Network Configuration Manager's Security Audit report provides you with details on common security issues in your network and the impact of each issue. In the security audit report, each security issue includes a finding, its impact, how easy it would be for an attacker to exploit and a suitable remediation to mitigate the issue.
Network Configuration Manager helps to analyze potential security issues by breaking them down into five sections. The following table consists of the five different aspects of any security issue and a description for each.
| Network security audit report section | Description |
|---|---|
| Issue Finding | The issue finding describes under which configuration setting, Network Configuration Manager identified a potential threat. |
| Issue Impact | The impact section describes what an attacker could gain from exploiting the security issue. This section also identifies the configuration settings that can mitigate an issue. Eg: A weak password |
| Issue Ease | This section describes the knowledge, skill and physical access that would be required of an attacker in order to exploit a loophole. |
| Issue Recommendation | This section includes the remediation steps, Network Configuration Manager recommends in order to mitigate the issue. |
| Issue Overall Rating | Issue Overall Rating |
Now let us see the common security issues that can affect your network and how Network Configuration Manager can help in analyzing the grey areas in your network.
When users forget to configure passwords, an attacker or a malicious user could gain access to by authenticating without providing a password and extract information about the device and networks configuration. With this information, he can attack other devices. With network security audit reports, you can set strong authentication passwords and immediately configure them using configlets.
Access Control Lists (ACLs) must be configured in order to restrict network access to specific network hosts. Failing to configure ACL can invite unauthorized traffic which can prove to be a threat to your network performance. The security audit report provides the guidelines to be followed while configuring ACL policies, in order to restrict attackers and unwanted entry.
Logging is an essential component of a secure network configuration to prevent intrusion attempts and Denial-of-Service (DOS) attacks. If Syslog message logging is not configured, administrators may never be alerted to potential issues with the device, or a possible intrusion attempt. The network security audit report addresses this and recommends syslog logging be configured in all critical devices.
Network devices are capable of loading their configuration from a configuration file stored on another network device, rather than using a local configuration file, if auto-loading is not disabled. This can probe an attacker to copy that device configuration and decrypt passwords. The network security audit report provides the suitable command to disable auto-loading.
Therefore, with detailed reports, you can deal with security issues and make your network immune to attacks.
Not just security reports, Network Configuration Manager, also provides EOL/EOS reports, start-up/running configuration reports etc., to ensure you gain greater visibility into your device configurations.