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 layer 8 – the insider threat

As you probably know, users are also called layer 8 (as a joke) because they are on top of the 7-layer OSI model.

Another, more professional, way to call users is insiders. These insiders are a serious threat because they are already inside the network; therefore, many of our defensive systems and mechanisms (which are used to prevent users from accessing our network) will not apply to them.

Now, we will cover the different types of users that you need to consider when creating your cybersecurity strategy.

The inadvertent user

Based on a study from the Ponemon Institute, around 24 percent of data breaches are caused by innocent human errors. We call them innocent errors because they are normally user mistakes in which there is no user intention to cause harm to the data or the systems.

Many people believe that these kinds of incidents are rare or cause minimal impact. However, as you can see in the following diagram...