Fred is a network technician working for Johnson Services, a temporary employment agency in Boston. Johnson Services has three remote offices in New England and the headquarters in Boston where Fred works.
The company relies on a number of customized applications to perform daily tasks and unfortunately these applications require users to be local administrators. Because of this, Fred's supervisor wants to implement
tighter security measures in other areas to compensate for the inherent risks in making those users local admins. Fred's boss wants a solution that will be placed on all computers throughout the company and
monitored by Fred. This solution will gather information on all network traffic to and from the local computers without actually affecting the traffic. What type of solution does Fred's boss want to implement?
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A
The solution described is a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). A NIDS is designed to monitor and analyze network traffic for all computers on a network without affecting the traffic flow. It gathers information on potential security threats and alerts the network administrator---in this case, Fred---without taking direct action to block the traffic. This aligns with the requirement of Fred's boss for a solution that monitors network traffic and gathers information without impacting it. Unlike a Network Intrusion Prevention System (NIPS), which actively blocks potential threats, or Host-based Intrusion Detection/Prevention Systems (HIDS/HIPS), which are installed on individual hosts, a NIDS operates at the network level to monitor traffic across all systems.
