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

Interpreting results from security assessments

When we're looking at the results from security assessments, there are two types, similar to how we split the third-party assessments in the previous section. These two types are technical assessments and Risk Management and Governance assessments.

Both types of reports will generally try to quantify the level of risk posed by each of the vulnerabilities found by assigning a score (either 1-5, 1-10, or some other scale) to them. It's important that you consider the value of your assets from your risk assessment proceedings, as sometimes a vulnerability could be seen as highly exploitable, but perhaps isn't worth mitigating, because it wouldn't stand to protect anything of value. In other words, the level of risk that's presented is below the risk acceptance level.

Often, the technical reports will include a narrative of how the penetration test was undertaken on a step-by-step basis, with screenshots,...