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 cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats

All systems, processes, infrastructures, and environments have vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities are normally caused by design flaws, bugs, bad implementations, a lack of updates, and many other causes that attackers (or threat agents) will leverage in order to gain access to your systems and/or cause disruption.

The question is not whether a system has vulnerabilities, but who will discover them first?

Performing a vulnerability assessment

As a cybersecurity expert, you must be on the constant search for new vulnerabilities in order to keep your infrastructure secure.

The process of performing this search is called vulnerability assessment.

There are two main ways to do it. The first is to use offensive techniques (such as penetration testing), and the second one is more like a defensive technique based on the identification of known vulnerabilities on your infrastructure by searching for all the vulnerabilities...