How to Guard your PC network from hackers?

Today the major problem that the computer users faces is of their network security.Now a days the main target of the hackers are the PC's of the managers of the topmost IT companies.But now the work is going on this problem of network security,computer scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology led by an Indian-origin researcher have developed a new model for helping these managers safeguard valuable information most efficiently.

Generally a hacker penetrate into network using FTP server, SSH server or database server,but now with this model would act as a guide for IT managers in securing their networks by assigning a probable risk of attack. Actually Computer networks are made up of components varying from individual computers, to servers and routers. Once inside a network's firewall, for a seemingly mild-mannered purpose as posting an image to a file transfer protocol (FTP) site, a hacker can travel through the network through a variety of routes to hit the jackpot of valuable data.In fact, the hacker can also break in through software on the computers, especially file-sharing applications that have been blamed for some major data breaches recently.Now researchers at NIST evaluate each route and assign it a risk based on how challenging it is to the hacker.

The paths are determined using a technique called "attack graphs."For example in a simple system there is an attacker on a computer, a firewall, router, an FTP server and a database server. The goal for the attacker is to find the simplest path into the jackpot-the database server.Attack Graph Analysis determines three potential attack paths. For each path in the graph, the NIST researchers assign an attack probability based on the score in the NVD database.As it takes multiple steps to reach the goal, the probabilities of each component are multiplied to determine the overall risk. One path takes only three steps. The first step has an 80 per cent chance of being hacked, the second, a 90 per cent chance.The final step requires great expertise, so there is only a 10 per cent probability it can be breached. By multiplying the three probabilities together, that path is pretty secure with a less than 10 per cent chance of being hacked.