Before I start writing this article, here is a disclaimer. I am not writing this article to rubbish Nigeria as a country and I am not a Yahoo Boy and I will never in my wildest dream support their nefarious activities. I just wanted ordinary Nigerians and all my […]

Simply having a wired or wireless physical connection between end devices is not enough to enable communication. For communication to occur, devices must know “how” to communicate. Communication, whether face-to-face or over a network, is governed by rules called protocols. These protocols are specific to the type of communication method […]

Knowing the OSI reference model and the TCP/IP protocol model will come in handy when you learn about how data is encapsulated as it moves across a network. It is not as simple as a physical letter being sent through the mail system. In this article, I will be talking […]

In my previous article, I have talked much about how data travels across the network. In this article, I want to talk more about MAC addresses and IP Addresses. Follow me as we will look at that in this article. There are two primary addresses assigned to a device on […]

If your network is using the IPv4 communications protocol, the Address Resolution Protocol, or ARP, is what you need to map IPv4 addresses to MAC addresses. This topic explains how ARP works. Every IP device on an Ethernet network has a unique Ethernet MAC address. When a device sends an […]

Application layer programs generate data that must be exchanged between the source and destination hosts. The transport layer is responsible for logical communications between applications running on different hosts. This may include services such as establishing a temporary session between two hosts and the reliable transmission of information for an […]

You already know the fundamentals of TCP. Understanding the role of port numbers will help you to grasp the details of the TCP communication process. In this topic, you will also learn about the TCP three-way handshake and session termination processes. Each application process running on a server is configured […]

The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) for IPv4 service automates the assignment of IPv4 addresses, subnet masks, gateways, and other IPv4 networking parameters. This is referred to as dynamic addressing. The alternative to dynamic addressing is static addressing. When using static addressing, the network administrator manually enters IP address information […]

The webservers that we so often connect to using names like www⋅cisco⋅com, are actually reached by assigning IP addresses to packets. On the internet, these domain names are much easier for people to remember than an IP address such as 74.163.4.161. If Cisco decides to change the numeric address of […]

  The network devices that people are most familiar with are end devices. To distinguish one end device from another, each end device on a network has an address. When an end device initiates communication, it uses the address of the destination end device to specify where to deliver the […]

Now that the router has determined the best path for a packet based on the longest match, it must determine how to encapsulate the packet and forward it out to the correct egress interface. The figure explains how a router determines the best path to use to forward a packet. […]

When it comes to general security breaches, home networks are the most susceptible to attacks. The reason is that home network users always have the mindset that they have nothing that the hacker will be interested in. That is why most times, they do not always take the security of […]

IP was designed as a Layer 3 connectionless protocol. It provides the necessary functions to deliver a packet from a source host to a destination host over an interconnected system of networks. The protocol was not designed to track and manage the flow of packets. These functions, if required, are […]

  In this article, I want to look at common network security monitoring tools in cybersecurity. Follow me as we look at this together in this article. Common tools that are used for network security monitoring include:   Network protocol analyzers such as Wireshark and Tcpdump NetFlow Security Information and […]

“All networks are targets” is a common adage used to describe the current landscape of network security. Therefore, to mitigate threats, all networks must be secured and protected. This article will look at network security topology in Cybersecurity.   This requires a defence-in-depth approach. It requires using proven methods and […]