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

Chapter 8: Improving the Security of Software

Software has enabled organizations around the world to increase their productivity to unforeseen levels of efficiency, helping to automate previously manual and menial tasks. By looking at your organization's software assets (and updating your risk register as you do it), you have become more and more aware that nearly every business process is aided by at least one software solution, and that the more resilient, secure, and available the software is, the more benefit is seen by the organization.

Some of your software has probably been developed in-house, and other software has been purchased or licensed from third parties. These systems often present huge attack surfaces, with many moving parts that are ready to be exploited, and since they process confidential and sensitive information and store business-critical data, unauthorized access to (or destruction of) these systems can lead to either permanent loss of critical data...