Scenario/Situation:

For the purpose of this assessment, consider that the following network design is for a Small-Medium Business organisation with limited resources allocated for network security. The network design only illustrates the part that you are required to focus and forms the scope of the assessment. The rest of the Internal Network consists of servers and LAN computers that are used for internal purposes only.

You are required to deploy two virtual machines (VMs) as shown in the diagram below: one serving as a firewall and the other serving as an SSH Server. The firewall VM also integrates intrusion detection capabilities, therefore, in addition to filtering network traffic, it should alert any potential intrusion attempts.

Tasks: 1. Create two virtual machines to be used as the Firewall VM (i.e. firewall + IDS) and SSH VM. You may use VMWare or VirtualBox for this task. If you intend to use something else, please contact the lecturer first for approval. The guest operating system for each VM should be Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.4 LTS.

2. On the SSH VM: install and configure OpenSSH to enable the Remote Client to connect remotely. "Remote" in this instance only means either your host machine or a second VM that you run on you host machine. You do not need to enable remote access via the Internet. Furthermore, you are required to harden the SSH Server to ensure its security.

3. On the Firewall VM: Configure the firewall using iptables (not ufw), to ensure security of the internal network and also to enable remote access to the SSH Server.

4. On the Firewall VM: install and configure snort to function as an IDS for the network. You should configure beyond the default rules to ensure it is useful for the purpose of activities you are performing in Steps 2 and 3. 5.