You have been tasked to analyze and assess the security posture of your organizations network resources and servers. Throughout this course, the assignments will have you review and analyze the policies and processes procedures that are implemented to ensure the security of one of an organizations most important assets: network resources. You will learn how to systematically approach a vulnerability assessment and along the way anticipate the methods that hackers take to break into a system with the goal of finding the same vulnerabilities they would and correcting them to reduce the likelihood of an exploit.

To begin, you are tasked to describe what mechanisms and tools can be implemented to detect and prevent an intrusion into the network. Describe what an Intrusion Detection System and an Intrusion Prevention system are, how they are similar and how they are different. In addition, what other mechanisms can be used in a network and server environment to detect when an intrusion has taken place.