The Current Status of Network Security and Forensics –Literature Review
Creators: name: Leutele Grey
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2013
Subjects: Applied Computer Science

description: In the beginning, standalone systems limited the potentials of damages once a machine has been compromised, and it was only until after the introduction of networking concepts that the floodgates of hacking began. This review investigates broad areas of Network Security and Forensics and their current status. Today Networking technology has improved tremendously, going beyond the mainframe model with new concepts such as peer to peer communication, wired and wireless, Internet and IoTs to name just a few. Moreover, as the Internet accessibility became commercially available in the early 1990s at affordable prices, cyber-crime reached its peak while crossing international boundaries (DeZabala &amp; Baich, 2010; Samant, Agawal, Jadhav &amp; Gharat, 2012; Saini, Rao &amp; Panda 2012; Tushabe &amp; Baryamureeba, 2011)). For example, the CSO 2010 Cyber Security Watch Survey reported that cybercrime constitutes a significantly more common and larger threat as the global economy continue to increase its reliance on the internet e.g. stock trade, bank transactions, sales and purchasing etc. In comparison, the<strong> </strong>Norton Cybercrime 2011 Report had disclosed that over 74 million people in the United States became victims of cybercrime in 2010 resulting to $32 billion direct and indirect financial losses. In addition, 69% of adults were victims of cybercrime, boosting the total number of victims up to 1 million per day. Interestingly, Saini et al, (2012) estimates that there were nearly 2 billion internet users and over 5 billion mobile phone connections worldwide. And, on a daily basis it was reported that about 294 billion emails and 5 billion phone messages were exchanged which means that the number of cybercrime victims per hour was 50,000, 820 per minute and 14 per second. Samant et al, 2012; Aseef, Davis, Mittal, Sedky and Tolba, 2005; Kshetri, 2006; Tushabe et al, 2011, Khadam, 2012 and Lewis (2013) all broadly defined cybercrime as any illegal behaviour committed by means of, or in relation to, a computer system or network or over the internet. Some examples of illegal behaviours include; critical infrastructure attacks, online fraud, money laundering, criminal use of Internet communications, ID fraud, and the use of computers to further conduct traditional crimes and cyber extortions. <strong> </strong>Decker (2007) further categorizes cybercrime into two basic types: (1) destructive or intrusive activity aimed at computer networks and their information; (2) crimes where computers are used as tools for committing other and/or more traditional or illicit activities against persons or property. The rest of this review is structured as follows: Section II discusses other related work and analysis, Section III is Problem Formulation, Section IV discusses the review Assumptions and section V briefly explores the Protocols. Section VI describes networking and network security and components. Section VII introduces the Internet and IoT, while section VIII investigates the WLAN. We explore in sections IX and X risk mitigations and digital forensics, and we concluded on section X1.