@baselzind wrote:
please would someone clarify what harm can a hub or an unamanged switch do to a network?
In a blink of an eye, an unmanaged switch or a hub can take your network down due to spanning-tree loop. And that's only for beginners.
How about a hub or an unmanaged switch can introduce an ingress threat vector for hackers into your network.
Permit me to tell everyone a nice story: In one of my job, we had a site that had a network cabinet. In the cabinet were our (corporate) switch gear, a vendor network gear and another network gear. One of the vendor gear had a DSL link connected to it. The decision to locate the two vendor switches in the same cabinet was outside our control. The vendors demand a space. But we were explicit that both vendor switches need to be different colored patch cables, which, of course the site did not follow. We also warned the site never to patch any of the switches together.
One day, that site called up to report a severity 1 incident. To make matters worse, the site contact did not follow protocols and rang up our head honcho. Basically, they "escalated" without any trouble tickets raised.
The incident was around the corporate network stopped. Printing stopped. VoIP stopped. Nothing worked. NOTHING. When we remoted into the site's network everything was topsy turvy. Everything was sporting a 192.168.X.X IP address. We spent about two hours troubleshooting without any result. Until someone accidentally found out that one of access ports suddenly had 50 MAC addresses attached to it.
We pulled all the MAC addresses and ran all of them into an OUI identifier. And then one of them stood out. A big f*cking switch.
Well, I lost it and I saw red. I called up the person who reported the severity 1 incident and yelled screamed at him (including threats to bodily harm). It was one thing to report an incident a "severity 1" without a ticket but it was something else if it was a "self-inflicted injury" and they wanted someone to blame.
