This week there has been a great deal of attention on the new found vulnerabilities in Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) – a protocol used in many devices across the corporate world.
This is just one in a string of recent scares but according to reports this is serious on the scale of Nimda (source: vnunet). This news is making last week"s announcement that Windows is more secure than Linux (statistically) fade into insignificance as Window"s devices could become the victim of this serious flaw.
One of the key elements of the Internet could also be effected as routers could be re-booted and therefore could be subject to DoS attacks. These attacks could also be on other network devices within a corporation and could effectively make a company"s network have serious operational problems and therefore loose money and man hours.
SNMP is an application layer protocol used to help with the management information that needs to be exchanged between network devices, and is part of the TCP/IP protocol suite. It allows the easy management of a network"s performance and to expand and troubleshoot the network.
But SNMP has never been that secure... (click read more to continue)