Book Image

The Cybersecurity Playbook for Modern Enterprises

By : Jeremy Wittkop
Book Image

The Cybersecurity Playbook for Modern Enterprises

By: Jeremy Wittkop

Overview of this book

Security is everyone's responsibility and for any organization, the focus should be to educate their employees about the different types of security attacks and how to ensure that security is not compromised. This cybersecurity book starts by defining the modern security and regulatory landscape, helping you understand the challenges related to human behavior and how attacks take place. You'll then see how to build effective cybersecurity awareness and modern information security programs. Once you've learned about the challenges in securing a modern enterprise, the book will take you through solutions or alternative approaches to overcome those issues and explain the importance of technologies such as cloud access security brokers, identity and access management solutions, and endpoint security platforms. As you advance, you'll discover how automation plays an important role in solving some key challenges and controlling long-term costs while building a maturing program. Toward the end, you'll also find tips and tricks to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from an increasingly dangerous digital world. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a holistic understanding of cybersecurity and how it evolves to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Modern Security Challenges
5
Section 2 – Building an Effective Program
9
Section 3 – Solutions to Common Problems

Password complexity and why it matters

Password length and complexity are particularly effective against brute-force attacks and rainbow tables. A brute-force attack is where a system is used to try combinations of passwords until one works. This is where password length is supremely important. Each additional character increases the work factor of a brute-force attack exponentially. Using a baseline of 15 million key attempts per second, a brute-force system could crack a seven-character password in less than 10 minutes. A 13-character password using the same system would take well over 300,000 years. As computing power continues to improve, those time frames continue to come down, but longer passwords are exponentially better than shorter ones. Adding three characters to every password the next time you change it will significantly reduce the risk of a successful brute-force attack.

A rainbow table attack is an attack against commonly used passwords. Passwords are not stored as...