In order to control what machines are plugged into your network, Cisco introduced the “switchport port-security” command.   In this tutorial I’m going to explain how to use this command, and different options available using it.   Below is the breakdown of the commands I used in the live demo, and an explanation of each. [...]

Additional configuration to further lockdown Cisco router security.

In most smaller networks, or networks that have a few network administrators, when you log into a Cisco device you are only prompted for a password. This will take you to the Router> prompt where more than likely you will immediately type ‘enable’ to enter into privileged exec mode, and you will be prompted with [...]

Secure Shell (SSH) is a protocol that allows us to connect to devices securely by using encryption. Gone are the days were most networking engineers are happy with using plain telnet with it’s clear text transmission of data which could result in an attacker sniffing the line for usernames and passwords. Configuring SSH on a [...]

By default a Cisco device does not have any passwords on it, so access to the console is open by default, and anyone connecting to the device is able to access privileged mode (enable mode). This of course is a security risk and one of the first things that should be done with a new [...]

The console is a physical port on a Cisco device that allows us to connect to the device using a directly connected cable from your PC. It is the easiest and most reliable method of connecting to a Cisco device as it does not require configuration on the device and is enabled by default. It [...]

Hashing is very different from encryption even though so many people believe it is an encryption protocol. Yes it does scramble the data, so from that aspect it is an encryption program, but the big difference between hashing and encryption, is that Hashing is mathematically impossible to reverse. Now I’m not the kind of person [...]

Ports are logical channels that devices use to identify a type of traffic. If you can imagine that you and I have a 10 meter cable, that has 10,000 wires running through it, and I take 2 of the wires and attach them into the ends of a battery, and you choose 2 wires on [...]

The concept of encryption can be quite daunting when you first look at it, however the basic concept of encryption is not that hard to understand   When I moved into my house, my bathroom door didn’t have a key. The previous owners of the house didn’t know what key was needed for that door [...]