🔒 Defending Your Network: Understanding and Preventing VLAN Hopping Attacks 🔒
- Tony Fortunato
- 38 minutes ago
- 1 min read
Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) are essential for segmenting network traffic to enhance security and performance. However, misconfigurations can expose networks to VLAN hopping attacks, where malicious actors gain unauthorized access to traffic on different VLANs.
The article from Internetworks delves into the two primary methods of VLAN hopping: switch spoofing and double tagging. Switch spoofing exploits the Dynamic Trunking Protocol (DTP) by tricking switches into forming trunk links, granting attackers access to multiple VLANs. Double tagging involves inserting two VLAN tags into a frame, allowing it to traverse VLAN boundaries undetected.
To mitigate these threats, the article recommends several best practices: disabling DTP on all access ports, configuring switch ports explicitly as access ports, avoiding the use of VLAN 1 for user traffic, enabling port security to restrict MAC addresses, shutting down unused ports, and implementing Private VLANs (PVLANs) for added isolation. Regular monitoring and auditing of VLAN configurations are also crucial in maintaining network security.
