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

Access control models and concepts

When it comes to information security, the same idea applies from the physical security realm; restricting access to a location or asset is referred to as access control. When we say access, we could mean physically entering a space or digitally accessing a folder. We could mean reading a printed document in an office, but we can also consider the CRUD possibilities in a digital estate as well.

The classic (or retro?) access control is a lock and key. If somebody has the key, they're able to access what the lock is preventing access to. And if they have the key, they're allowed to access it, right? Is it that simple? Of course not. What we want is the ability to ensure that the people with the key are the people with permission, and try our best to ensure that even with the key, the wrong people aren't allowed to (or authorized to) access what they shouldn't.

Before diving into the models, I'd like to cover four key...