Ethical hacking: TCP/IP for hackers

Introduction

In this article, we’ll discuss TCP/IP: the importance of mastering it and how this mastery can be beneficial to hackers. We will then look at how hackers are able to attack TCP/IP and the different network attacks associated with it. We’ll also discuss the methods that security teams can use to protect themselves from these TCP/IP attacks.

Overview of TCP/IP

TCP/IP is actually the most widely-used protocol today. TCP/IP is currently the most common standard for communicating devices within computer networks. 

The TCP/IP stack is divided into several layers, each of which is important for particular aspects of communication. It is possible to develop each of these layers without affecting adjacent ones. With TCP/IP, data encapsulation is achieved in different headers across different transportation layers of the protocol stack. 

Despite attempts to make TCP as secure as possible, there still are some attacks that abuse it.

What are some essential TCP/IP hacking techniques?

Hackers are able to attack some flaws that exist within the TCP/IP protocol suite. There are three major attacks:

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• Address spoofing
• TCP sequence number prediction
• Port scanning

Let’s briefly discuss these techniques.

Address spoofing

Hackers have always been able to manipulate the direction that an IP packet takes based on the implementation of the IP header. Whoever has access to the IP header can act as a routing device and determine where the packet goes. This is true for both the source and destination of the traffic. 

Hackers can then impersonate another host’s IP address within the network and send packets appearing to originate from this host.

TCP sequence number prediction

This attack attempts to correctly guess the sequence number used to identify packets in a TCP connection. If hackers are able to achieve this, they can counterfeit packets heading to the target (Read more...)