Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By : Joseph MacMillan
Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By: Joseph MacMillan

Overview of this book

Information security and risk management best practices enable professionals to plan, implement, measure, and test their organization's systems and ensure that they're adequately protected against threats. The book starts by helping you to understand the core principles of information security, why risk management is important, and how you can drive information security governance. You'll then explore methods for implementing security controls to achieve the organization's information security goals. As you make progress, you'll get to grips with design principles that can be utilized along with methods to assess and mitigate architectural vulnerabilities. The book will also help you to discover best practices for designing secure network architectures and controlling and managing third-party identity services. Finally, you will learn about designing and managing security testing processes, along with ways in which you can improve software security. By the end of this infosec book, you'll have learned how to make your organization less vulnerable to threats and reduce the likelihood and impact of exploitation. As a result, you will be able to make an impactful change in your organization toward a higher level of information security.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Information Security Risk Management and Governance
4
Section 2: Closing the Gap: How to Protect the Organization
8
Section 3: Operationalizing Information Security

Effective strategies in provisioning resources and maintaining assets

There was a poll conducted by Automox in companies with between 500 and 25,000 employees, with over 500 IT and InfoSec professionals answering the questions (https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/missing-patches-misconfiguration-top-technical-breach-causes/d/d-id/1337410). Automox found that over 80% had been breached over the past 2 years, and the following numbers show the vulnerability type that was exploited in those breaches:

  • Missing operating system patches (30%)
  • Missing application patches (28%)
  • Operating system misconfiguration (27%)

The chain of events that occurs after a successful phishing attempt or credential harvest generally involves exploiting one of the preceding vulnerabilities. The brilliant thing is that we can prevent this with the provisioning of approved configurations and ensuring our assets are maintained, with both operating system and application...