What Is the Work of Cyber Security

1.       Conduct cyber security training and awareness

A strong cyber security strategy would not be successful if the employees are not educated on topics of cyber security, company policies and incidence reporting. Even the best technical defenses may fall apart when employees make unintentional or intentional malicious actions resulting in a costly security breach. Educating employees and raising awareness of company policies and security best practices through seminars, classes, online courses is the best way to reduce negligence and the potential of a security violation.

2.       Perform risk assessments

Organizations should perform a formal risk assessment to identify all valuable assets and prioritize them based on the impact caused by an asset when its compromised.  This will help organizations decide how to best spend their resources on securing each valuable asset.

3.       Ensure vulnerability management and software patch management/updates

It is crucial for organizational IT teams to perform identification, classification, remediation, and mitigation of vulnerabilities within all software and networks that it uses, to reduce threats against their IT systems. Furthermore, security researchers and attackers identify new vulnerabilities within various software every now and then which are reported back to the software vendors or released to the public. These vulnerabilities are often exploited by malware and cyber attackers. Software vendors periodically release updates which patch and mitigate these vulnerabilities. Therefore, keeping IT systems up-to-date helps protect organizational assets.

4.       Use the principle of least privilege

The principle of least privilege dictates that both software and personnel should be allotted the least amount of permissions necessary to perform their duties. This helps limits the damage of a successful security breach as user accounts/software having lower permissions would not be able to impact valuable assets that require a higher-level set of permissions. Also, two-factor authentication should be used for all high-level user accounts that have unrestricted permissions.

5.       Enforce secure password storage and policies

Organizations should enforce the use of strong passwords that adhere to industry recommended standards for all employees. They should also be forced to be periodically changed to help protect from compromised passwords. Furthermore, password storage should follow industry best practices of using salts and strong hashing algorithms.

6.       Implement a robust business continuity and incidence response (BC-IR) plan

Having a solid BC-IR plans and policies in place will help an organization effectively respond to cyber-attacks and security breaches while ensuring critical business systems remain online.

7.       Perform periodic security reviews

Having all software and networks go through periodic security reviews helps in identifying security issues early on and in a safe environment. Security reviews include application and network penetration testing, source code reviews, architecture design reviews, red team assessments, etc. Once security vulnerabilities are found, organizations should prioritize and mitigate them as soon as possible.

8.       Backup data

Backing up all data periodically will increase redundancy and will make sure all sensitive data is not lost or comprised after a security breach. Attacks such as injections and ransomware, compromise the integrity and availability of data. Backups can help protect in such cases.

9.       Use encryption for data at rest and in transit

All sensitive information should be stored and transferred using strong encryption algorithms. Encrypting data ensures confidentiality. Effective key management and rotation policies should also be put in place. All web applications/software should employ the use of SSL/TLS.

10.   Design software and networks with security in mind

When creating applications, writing software, architecting networks, always design them with security in place. Bear in mind that the cost of refactoring software and adding security measures later on is far greater than building in security from the start. Security designed application help reduce the threats and ensure that when software/networks fail, they fail safe.

11.   Implement strong input validation and industry standards in secure coding

Strong input validation is often the first line of defense against various types of injection attacks. Software and applications are designed to accept user input which opens it up to attacks and here is where strong input validation helps filter out malicious input payloads that the application would process. Furthermore, secure coding standards should be used when writing software as these helps avoid most of the prevalent vulnerabilities outlined in OWASP and CVE.

What Is the Work of Cyber Security

Source: https://www.synopsys.com/glossary/what-is-cyber-security.html#:~:text=Cyber%20security%20can%20be%20described,cyber%2Dattacks%20or%20unauthorized%20access.

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