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

Preparing for security assessments

How do we know our systems are secure from attackers? How do we know that our systems are resilient? How do we know that our systems are appropriately redundant?

Unfortunately, the answer simply cannot be "because I designed them myself" (sunglasses on, standing on a Segway in the elevator). A second pair of eyes is important, at the very least. Why do I say, "at the very least"? Sometimes, your second pair of eyes is a colleague who either doesn't have the appropriate knowledge, or the appropriate segregation from the organization, in order to make the observations they might make if they didn't have a boss that was going to be offended by their input.

First of all, you need buy-in from Top Management. This is another classic theme in this book, and a classic theme in Information Security that you'll see in various standards. For example, in ISO 27001's requirements (https://www.iso.org/standard/54534...