Cisco Network Security Master Class

Master the three security objectives: confidentiality, integrity, and availability, with encryption and VPN tunnels. Explore assets, vulnerabilities, threats, risks, and countermeasures, and apply security zones like inside, outside, and DMZ.

Identify common security threats, from reconnaissance with ping sweeps and port scanners to privilege escalation, backdoors, malware, social engineering, and data exfiltration.

Describe how cryptography secures network communications with encryption, hashing, and key management. Compare symmetric and asymmetric encryption, explain ciphers, hashing algorithms, PKI, certificate authorities, CSRs, and HTTPS with identity certificates.

Discover the five network topologies essential for the ccna security exam, including campus area networks, WAN or cloud area networks, data center topology, SoHo, and virtual networks.

Secure network management by implementing in-band and out-of-band access, strong passwords with secret encryption (type five over type seven), SSH, and SNMP v3, plus reliable logging, NTP, and SCP.

Master the Triple A framework for network access: authentication, authorization, and accounting. Explore TACACS versus RADIUS and configure AAA on a lab switch with ISE, policies, and debugging.

Apply control plane policing to protect the router by policing control plane traffic with an access list, class map, and policy map, dropping excess traffic and verifying the policy.

Mitigate layer 2 attacks by enabling bpdu guard, root guard, loop guard, and port security; deploy dhcp snooping and arp inspection with trusted bindings.

Segment traffic with VLANs and private VLANs to secure network. Primary VLAN forwards; isolated VLANs block secondary VLANs; community VLANs allow user group talk; configure a promiscuous port for uplinks.

Explore the differences among firewall technologies, from gateway firewalls enforcing traffic between trusted and untrusted networks. Learn how proxy, application, and personal firewalls enable selective inspection at different levels.

Configure zone based firewalling on a Cisco IOS router with inside and outside zones, class maps, policy maps, and zone pairs to enforce stateful inspection and inter-zone control.

Configure a Cisco ASA firewall from initial setup to remote management, including console access, SSH/HTTPS, the management interface, local users, time, logging, and upgrading software via ASDM and ACM.

Configure Cisco ASA access lists to permit http and https to a DMZ server, applying the ACL to the outside zone with the access-group command.

Explore the modular policy framework with class maps and policy maps to apply application inspection, quality of service, and IPS redirection on a Cisco ASA device.

Compare Cisco ASA deployment modes: routed mode with layer 3 interfaces and transparent mode with layer 2 interfaces, and learn when to switch to transparent using the global config command.

Enable multi-context mode on a Cisco ASA, create multiple virtual firewalls, assign interfaces to contexts, and manage admin context features like AAA, SNMP, and logging.

Learn how SSL clientless VPN delivers browser-based remote access secured by a trusted certificate. Explore CSR creation, CA signing, and certificate installation on the RSA firewall, plus testing and monitoring.

Establish a site-to-site vpn between RSA firewall and a Cisco CSR router using command-line and gui wizards; configure phase one and two, nat exclusion, and crypto maps, then verify connectivity.

Learn how intrusion prevention systems use inline and promiscuous deployments, signature and anomaly based detection, and actions like drop or block to protect networks and tune for false positives.

Mitigate web based threats by deploying Cisco web security appliances with URL filtering, application visibility, malware protection, and data loss prevention across on-site and cloud solutions.

Mitigate endpoint threats by recognizing viruses, worms, trojan horses, exploits, rootkits, and ransomware, and implement protections like antivirus, anti-malware, firewalls, and encryption such as vpn, disk encryption, and email encryption.