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

Understanding the importance of logs

Before talking about the importance of logs, let's take a few minutes to understand some of the core attributes of logs, including their origins, the types, and even some standards used in the industry.

Log files

Logs were created as a way to record events in the operating system or applications. They started as a great debugging and troubleshooting tool, but now they are used for many other purposes, such as auditing, security, and compliance:

Figure 15.1 – View of logs on a Windows system

Most log files are simple text files with common attributes such as log type, timestamp, ID, and user. Most operating systems and applications categorize the different types of logs for ease of analysis. The most common categories are as follows:

  • Error log
  • System log
  • Application log
  • Access log
  • Transaction log

In theory, this sounds very simple, right? But in reality, it is not, and let...