Attacks on the management plane and how to defend against them
The management plane is the part of the device responsible for controlling the device—that is, to log in to the device and configure it, to receive SNMP commands, to send SNMP traps and System Logging Protocol (Syslog) messages to a management console, and so on.
For this reason, attacks on the management plane can be categorized as follows.
The first sorts of attacks are brute-force attacks for password discovery, such as the following:
- Brute-force attacks for password discovery—Telnet, Secure Shell (SSH)
- Brute-force attacks against SNMP passwords (community strings)
- Brute-force attacks against HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)/HTTP Secure (HTTPS) passwords
- Brute-force attacks on proprietary-access applications
The next kinds of attacks are attacks on the management plane intended to interfere with the management of the device. In this category, we have the following:
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