Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By : Cesar Bravo
Book Image

Mastering Defensive Security

By: Cesar Bravo

Overview of this book

Every organization has its own data and digital assets that need to be protected against an ever-growing threat landscape that compromises the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of crucial data. Therefore, it is important to train professionals in the latest defensive security skills and tools to secure them. Mastering Defensive Security provides you with in-depth knowledge of the latest cybersecurity threats along with the best tools and techniques needed to keep your infrastructure secure. The book begins by establishing a strong foundation of cybersecurity concepts and advances to explore the latest security technologies such as Wireshark, Damn Vulnerable Web App (DVWA), Burp Suite, OpenVAS, and Nmap, hardware threats such as a weaponized Raspberry Pi, and hardening techniques for Unix, Windows, web applications, and cloud infrastructures. As you make progress through the chapters, you'll get to grips with several advanced techniques such as malware analysis, security automation, computer forensics, and vulnerability assessment, which will help you to leverage pentesting for security. By the end of this book, you'll have become familiar with creating your own defensive security tools using IoT devices and developed advanced defensive security skills.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1: Mastering Defensive Security Concepts
7
Section 2: Applying Defensive Security
15
Section 3: Deep Dive into Defensive Security

Improving IoT security

Now, let's analyze some additional mechanisms and best practices that you can apply to improve the security of IoT devices.

Default passwords

Change all the default passwords of all IoT devices upon installation.

Also, make sure you select very strong passwords for those devices, consisting of the following properties:

  • 15 characters long.
  • Letters (lower and upper case), numbers, and special characters.
  • Avoid the use of common words (also known as dictionary words) like names of countries, months of the year, and so on.
  • Change it at least twice a year for home devices and quarterly for business devices.
  • Use a password manager for secure and easy management of these passwords.

However, using a super password is not enough. You should also obfuscate the username to make things even harder for the attacker. Let's do this by changing the default user.

Default users

Default users like Admin are easy to guess for...