Introduction
Information in this Chapter
Book Overview and Key Learning Points
This book provides you seven chapters of content exploring some of the deadliest attacks performed against Microsoft software and networks and how these attacks can impact the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your company's most closely guarded secrets. Ultimately, this book will help demystify some of the common attacks performed by attackers today and allow your organization to help prevent successful attacks before they occur.
Understanding Microsoft software and being able to identify some of the most common types of attacks will help you understand the threats and hopefully prevent weak deployments of Microsoft services on your networks. In this book, you will learn about defensive controls available to organizations, which can drastically reduce their exploitable footprint. In every chapter, you will explore a variety of controls that can help keep your networks secure allowing for greater detection and prevention of malicious attacks.
Book Audience
This book will prove to be a valuable resource for anyone who is currently responsible for oversight of network security for either small or large organizations. It will also provide value to those who are interested in learning the details behind attacks against Microsoft infrastructure, products, and services, and how to defend against them. Network administrators and integrators will find value in learning how attacks can be executed, and transfer knowledge gained from this book into improving existing deployment and integration practices.
Executive-level management will gain an understanding of the threats and attacks that can be performed against their organizations. This book will reinforce the value of funding and supporting security initiatives that help protect customer and proprietary information stored by their organization.
Security professionals may refer to content in this book as a source of detailed information behind some of the attacks still relevant against Microsoft environments. Although this book is not designed to be a desktop reference for penetration testers, some of the techniques may still be useful when opportunities present themselves during penetration testing engagements. Many of the scenarios used throughout this book are similar to attacks still used by penetration testers.