Being the middle child stinks. You get hand me downs, you get less attention, you get less of everything, you sometimes get the shaft. Meet Mike. Mike is a middle child. From day one, little Mikey had to compete, for attention, for new legos, for chicken nugs and leftover cold waffle fries. His life was beyond difficult.
As Mikey grew up, he always found himself in the middle. For some reason, he was always the monkey in the middle, the middle seat at the movies behind the ridiculously tall guy, the third wheel on dates, and he always got the dreaded middle seat on airplane flights. He was destined to live in the middle, so he moved to the middle of nowhere. While in the middle of nowhere, his anger grew in his isolation. Little Mikey was turning to the dark side and was bored, so that’s probably really not a great combination.
Late one stormy night he started to tinker. Most of the time when one tinkers, they do something constructive, like building a lego set, or rewiring an automatic cat litter box with 220 volts. But, not our middle child friend Mikey. He took to the Internet. And it gets darker and darker from here. Mike devised a scheme, purely out of boredom, AND out of middledom. He set out to infiltrate a bank that had always ignored him when he went through the middle drive through. It was personal. It was sinister, and it worked like a champ. He found a way to get in the middle of vital communications at the bank. He would eavesdrop on communications between the bank and its ISP and then impersonate the ISP back to the bank to grab vital access and keys. It was really geeky, really elaborate, and really devastating to the bank. Essentially, our little middle child Mikey, was now the real life evil man in the middle, preying on corporations and bricking their routers. Once he attacked, there was no way for the organization to recover control as key firmware software within the router had been eroded, thus rendering them useless.
Mike’s wrath continues as his Man-in-the-middle attacks are becoming a huge problem for organizations around the globe. But a hero will emerge from the ruins. That hero is YOU. One of the best ways to help prevent these attacks is to isolate portions of your network. This can be done with a firewall, or multiple firewalls. The team at ASSI advises a firewall to be installed in between your ISPs router (Windstream, Spectrum, etc.) so that traffic isn’t all willy-nilly between the ISP and its router. Next, installing a firewall after the router helps to keep the PCs and other devices attached to the network insulated. Segmenting your network with firewalls can also help to isolate and shut down hackers much quicker.
The team at ASSI is here to help analyze your network and implement protocols and safety measures to help keep your office running as smoothly as possible. The key is to always strive to be one step ahead of menacing middle children like Mike. Give us a call today for a network analysis, you’ll be glad you did. Call 407-414-6626 today and… Relax. We’re on IT.
