(ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) promotes the U.S. economy and public welfare by providing technical leadership for the Nation's measurement and standards infrastructure. ITL develops tests, test methods, reference data, proof of concept implementations, and technical analyses to advance the development and productive use of information technology. ITL's responsibilities include the development of management, administrative, technical, and physical standards and guidelines for the cost-effective security and privacy of sensitive unclassified information in federal computer systems. This Special Publication 800-series reports on ITL's research, guidelines, and outreach efforts in information security, and its collaborative activities with industry, government, and academic organizations.
With funding from NSF the Department has set up a stand alone lab for students to learn penetration testing techniques(attack), to harden their networks against these attacks (defense) , and also to gather enough evidence to through careful logging and audit controls to convict a hacker (convict). Linux RedHat 7. l was used and all the machines were set up as standalone servers in three different subdomains, with 2 perimeter routers and 2 firewalls to allow experimentation with various configurations.In all over 50 soitware tools were downloaded and tested.Students were screened and asked to sign a disclaimer. They should also have been required to have networking experience. An initial mistake was to run a very minimal server with no services and practically no users. This was not realistic. It made it quick to rebuild systems but much harder to attack.The attacks need to be carefully planned and structured in a specific sequence one at a time, otherwise it becomes very difficult to follow what is going on.
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