Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By : Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Cybersecurity - Attack and Defense Strategies

By: Yuri Diogenes, Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

The book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Enhancing your security posture


If you carefully read this entire chapter, it should be very clear that you can't use the old approach to security facing today's challenges and threats. For this reason, it is important to ensure that your security posture is prepared to deal with these challenges. To accomplish this, you must solidify your current protection system across different devices regardless of the form factor.

It is also important to enable IT and security operations to quickly identify an attack, by enhancing the detection system. Last but certainly not least, it is necessary to reduce the time between infection and containment by rapidly responding to an attack by enhancing the effectiveness of the response process.

Based on this, we can safely say that the security posture is composed of three foundational pillars as shown in the following diagram:

These pillars must be solidified and if in the past, the majority of the budget was put into protection, now it's even more imperative to spread that investment and level of effort across the other pillars. These investments are not exclusively in technical security controls, they must also be done in the other spheres of the business, which includes administrative controls.

It is recommended to perform a self-assessment to identify the gaps within each pillar from the tool perspective. Many companies evolved over time and never really updated their security tools to accommodate the new threat landscape and how attackers are exploiting vulnerabilities.

A company with an enhanced security posture shouldn't be part of the statistics that were previously mentioned (229 days between the infiltration and detection). This gap should be drastically reduced and the response should be immediate. To accomplish this, a better incident response process must be in place, with modern tools that can help security engineers to investigate security-related issues. Chapter 2, Incident Response Process will cover incident response in more detail and Chapter 13, Investigating an Incident, will cover some case studies related to actual security investigations.