Switch On/Off

I remember the times I've got my first hub in my hands. These days a managed switch was not affordable or even existing in my tiny world. Nowaday a network admin is unscrupulous using an unmanaged switch under the desk. Just every secretary could accidently make a loop and suddenly network is down in this room.

Again misconfiguration and bottlenecks in serial attached network switches is the worst case scenario. Admin did a good job already if the Spanning Tree Protocol is turned on and assistant can't lockdown the network with a loop. So best attacking vectors beside the hardware attacks are in this case standard password and ARP Request Poisoning.

Fighting against network ARP attacks with your switch is not a trivial task. I do have a good solution for this issue described in the defense section of this website  - assuming the attacker is not one of your trusted company workstations.

There is a massive amount of network attack vectors around so be careful allowing guests to plug and play. But in my opinion network attacks and especially arp spoofing is the best way for information gathering. Playing a Man in the Middle Attack allows you to sniff auth packages of your tested device. That's how I've shown a company not to use ftp for transmitting failure protocols of their software.