Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By : MacMillan
Book Image

Infosec Strategies and Best Practices

By: 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

Understanding the risks your organization faces

In this section, we will focus our efforts on getting our heads around key concepts in the threats, vulnerabilities, and methods of exploiting information systems. This includes the types of systems we'll be dealing with, the threats that information security professionals are hired to protect those systems against, and the ways those threats exploit vulnerabilities in those systems. Only after we understand these key points can we move on to the protection section (that sounds like a Schoolhouse Rock! song, but do not worry—I'll keep this largely nonmusical).

Something I would like to stress is that when we are designing a new system—whether this is web-based, mobile, embedded, or what have you—there are processes in place that ensure the security of our systems by design, and then there are mitigation controls that provide defense-in-depth in the event of the failure of those processes.

First things...