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

Exploring software security paradigms

I'd like to take you on a trip down memory lane for a moment, and remember April 2014, an important moment in the general history of InfoSec; the world was blindsided by the disclosure of the CVE-2014-0160 vulnerability, given the moniker of Heartbleed. Now, when I use the term the world, I mean it. Heartbleed was the Jaws of software security blockbusters, getting a website of its own (heartbleed.com), and even its own logo:

Figure 8.1 – The Heartbleed vulnerability's logo

In the disclosure was information about how the OpenSSL cryptography library contained a vulnerability related to a buffer over-read, allowing a malicious actor to access cryptographic keys and login credentials, along with various other pieces of confidential information. It sounds bad, but it gets worse: the OpenSSL cryptography library is used in the OpenSSL version of the TLS protocol, widely used globally for securing data in transit...