Access
Access Control Management
In information security, there are a few areas which make up the concept of Access Control; Authentication, Authorization and Audit Trail.
At it’s core, Access Control is the idea of allowing access to only users or people who have been pre-emptively approved and to reject users who arenot recognized or who do not have the rights to the object.
Management an Audting of Identities is equally crucial to Successful data access control.
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Privileged Access Management (PAM)
Privileged Access Management (PAM) refers to a class of solutions that help secure, control, manage and monitor privileged access to critical assets.
To achieve these goals, PAM solutions typically take the credentials of privileged accounts – such as admin accounts – and store them in a secure repository (a vault), isolating the use of privileged accounts to reduce the risk of those credentials/ log-in IDs being stolen.
Once inside the repository, system administrators need to go through the PAM system to access their credentials/ log-in IDs, where they are authenticated and their access is logged. When a credential/ log-in IDs is checked back in, it will reset to ensure administrators have to go through the PAM system next time they want to use the credential/ log-in IDs.
By centralizing privileged credentials/ log-in IDs in one place, PAM systems ensure a high level of security by controlling who is accessing them, log all accesses and monitor for any suspicious activity.
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Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is an authentication method that requires the authenticating party (be it a person, software or a hardware module) to produce several separate identifiers (or “factors”) that are indicative to its identity, instead of the previously standard single identifier, usually a password, required by default in many systems.
Our high dependency on digital services, whether business or personal, has changed the way companies and regulators see user authentication. As the threat of cyber attacks targeting authentication mechanisms grows (most attacks on business data today leverage stolen or weak passwords to some degree [Verizon DBIR]) and countless incidents of account takeovers and data breaches are reported annually, all parties realize that standard password-dependent authentication is a huge security liability and require users and clients to use some sort of MFA.
MFA dramatically improves security since an attacker would need to gain possession of multiple identifiers at the same time, which is trickier than getting a single username-password combination. The set of identifiers used to authenticate users is typically comprised of at least two different types of factors:
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Something the user knows (i.e. a password, PIN or pattern)
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Something the user has (i.e. a physical OTP (one-time-password) token or security USB key
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Something the is inherent to the user (typically a biometric signature)
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Note: in some cases, location and network indicators are also used as additional authentication factors.
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Data Wiping
Data wiping is a process of erasing data from a hard drive or flash storage media so that it becomes unreadable. The process overwrites the data on the disk with random 0s and 1s. This permanently removes the original data from the drive so it is irrecoverable.
Importance of Data Wiping from Drive
Formatting a drive or deleting files does not remove data from the drive. One can easily recover data from the formatted drive by using a data recovery tool and may use your personal information or data to exploit you. Thus, it’s important to wipe data from drive to safeguard against data theft and privacy breach.
Removes Data beyond Recovery
Data wiping removes your sensitive but unneeded data from drive permanently beyond recovery. If you often share your storage media or want to dispose of, sell, donate it to someone, you should always secure wipe the data from the drive to safeguard against data leakage.
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Digital Risk Management
We can simply define “digital risk” as the consequences of adopting new technologies. These consequences are new and unexpected. Managing digital risk meant understanding the implications of adopting certain technologies—in other words, adopting technologies in a way that lowers digital risk within your organizations.
Whether you’re trying to address cyberthreats or third-party tools, in all cases, digital risk is becoming a crucial part of business risk management.
Types of Digital Risk
We can classify digital risks as cybersecurity risk, workforce risk, compliance risk, third-party risk, automation risk, resiliency risk, and data privacy risk. Moreover, these risks are not found in one single industry. They can happen to healthcare or financial services.
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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)
The goal of BCDR is to limit risk and get an organization running as close to normal as possible after an unexpected interruption. These practices enable an organization to get back on its feet after disruption, reducing the risk of data loss and reputational harm, and improve operations while decreasing the chance of emergencies. BC and DR are closely related practices that support an organization's ability to remain operational after an adverse event.
The trend of combining business continuity and disaster recovery into a single term, BCDR, is the result of a growing recognition that business and technology executives need to collaborate closely when planning for incident responses instead of developing schemes in isolation.
What's the difference between BC and DR?
BC is more proactive and generally refers to the processes and procedures an organization must implement to ensure that mission-critical functions can continue during and after a disaster. This area involves more comprehensive planning geared toward long-term challenges to an organization's success.
DR is more reactive and comprises specific steps an organization must take to resume operations following an incident. Disaster recovery actions take place after the incident, and response times can range from seconds to days.
BC typically focuses on the organization, whereas DR zeroes in on the technology infrastructure. Disaster recovery is a piece of business continuity planning and concentrates on accessing data easily following a disaster. BC includes this element, but also considers risk management and other planning an organization needs to stay afloat during an event.
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Risk Management
Cybersecurity is essentially managing risks to your organization’s Information Resources; such as protecting patient data, sensitive banking transactions, or the network infrastructure that allows your personnel to keep working effectively.
If you want to improve the security of the technology and data within your organization, you need to know what the risks are to your technology and data. And the best way to identify risk, is by conducting a Risk Assessment.
Conducting a Risk Assessment allows you to identify the threat sources to these technologies and the likelihood and impact to your organization associated with these threats.
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Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR)
The goal of BCDR is to limit risk and get an organization running as close to normal as possible after an unexpected interruption. These practices enable an organization to get back on its feet after disruption, reducing the risk of data loss and reputational harm, and improve operations while decreasing the chance of emergencies. BC and DR are closely related practices that support an organization's ability to remain operational after an adverse event.
The trend of combining business continuity and disaster recovery into a single term, BCDR, is the result of a growing recognition that business and technology executives need to collaborate closely when planning for incident responses instead of developing schemes in isolation.
What's the difference between BC and DR?
BC is more proactive and generally refers to the processes and procedures an organization must implement to ensure that mission-critical functions can continue during and after a disaster. This area involves more comprehensive planning geared toward long-term challenges to an organization's success.
DR is more reactive and comprises specific steps an organization must take to resume operations following an incident. Disaster recovery actions take place after the incident, and response times can range from seconds to days.
BC typically focuses on the organization, whereas DR zeroes in on the technology infrastructure. Disaster recovery is a piece of business continuity planning and concentrates on accessing data easily following a disaster. BC includes this element, but also considers risk management and other planning an organization needs to stay afloat during an event.
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Email Security
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is the only way to stop spoof emails.
We will be able to:
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See who is using your domain to send fake emails.
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Stops criminals from being able to send fraudulent emails from your account.
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Boosts your email deliverability by verifying you as the genuine sender.
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Full Disk Encryption (FDE)
Full-disk encryption (FDE) is encryption at the hardware level. FDE works by automatically converting data on a hard drive into a form that cannot be understood by anyone who doesn’t have the key to “undo” the conversion.
Without the proper authentication key, even if the hard drive is removed and placed in another machine, the data remains inaccessible. FDE can be installed on a computing device at the time of manufacturing or it can be added later on by installing a special software driver.
The advantage of FDE is that it requires no special attention on the part of the end user after he initially unlocks the computer. As data is written, it is automatically encrypted. When it is read, it is automatically decrypted.
Because everything on the hard drive is encrypted, including the operating system, a disadvantage of FDE is that the encrypting/decrypting process can slow down data access times, particularly when virtual memory is being heavily accessed.
FDE is especially useful for laptops and other small computing devices that can be physically lost or stolen. Because one key is used to encrypt the entire hard drive, FDE on the corporate level requires the network administrator to enforce a strong password policy and provide an encryption key backup process in case an employee forgets his password or leaves the company unexpectedly.
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Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is a technology used to protect endpoints, which are computer hardware devices, from threat.
EDR technology based platforms deploy tools to gather data from endpoint devices, and then analyze the data to reveal potential cyber threats and issues. It is a protection against hacking attempts and stealing of user data.
The software is installed on the end-user device and it is continually monitored. The data is stored in a centralized database. In an incident when a threat is found, the end-user is immediately prompted with preventive list of actions.
Every EDR platform has its unique set of capabilities. However, some common capabilities include the monitoring of endpoints in both the online and offline mode, responding to threats in real-time, increasing visibility and transparency of user data, detecting store endpoint events and malware injections, creating blacklists and whitelist, and integration with other technologies.
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Encrypted Drives
Flash drives continue to provide a quick and convenient way for data transfer, even in the advent of increase cloud transfer storage technologies.
In such environments, external storage drive have played an increasingly important role for secure data transfer. In many ways, unsecured external drives are prone to security weakness such as misplacement as well as malware that uses external drives as an attack vector, like stuxnet.
Hardware Encryption of the External Drive
Encryption is the most effective way of guaranteeing the privacy of the data that is stored in it. Once encrypted, data stored cannot be revealed without proper authorization.
Hardware based encryption guarantees that an unknown host trying to access the drive will not know the actual encryption key used for the flash drive. Such flash drives are also usually physically sealed to prevent hardware tampering attacks.
This also reduces the system requirement of the host from needing to install any encryption software to access the data as well as the dedicated cryptographic processor offload the overhead of encryption on the host system.
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Mobile Security
As the mobility market continues to evolve, we are seeing changes to the way enterprises evaluate the security needs of their enterprise mobility solutions. This has brought about an expansion of Mobile Threat Management (MTM) products that expand beyond the standard tracking and management of devices we have traditionally focused on with Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM).
The MTM market gains momentum as more enterprises decide that
EMM and native sandboxing and segmentation on mobile operating systems (OSs) are not enough to meet overall mobile threat management needs.
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Data Loss Prevention
Data Loss Prevention tools are made to help organizations from theft of data that leads to data breaches. These DLP (Data Loss Prevention) tools help monitor data at rest and in motion. It will then alert the Administrators when information is transferred when is not authorised.
Whether users are emailing it, uploading to the cloud, transferring onto portable devices or even just possessing data that they should not, DLP Solutions can help to monitor, alert and block it automatically when fundamental policies have been set in place.
DLP Solutions can also help in tracking who took out what, at which time and when, thus giving visibility to the organization and evidence as well to confront the perpetrator.
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End User Monitoring
End User Monitoring provides more than security. It also brings:
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Increased security
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Protection from insider attacks
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Increased information accuracy and fewer mistakes
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Increased productivity
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Errors are discovered earlier
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Processes can be optimized
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Reviews are based on real-time evidence and statistics
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Hard workers can be rewarded appropriately
With the massive amount of data that this kind of software collects about each individual being monitored, companies are able to focus on growth instead of micro management. Integrated AI analysis raises issues to management as they occur, allowing senior staff to focus on and manage priorities.
Over time performance will likely increase across the board, and organizations become far more efficient and profitable. What started as employee monitoring for security can help a struggling company become a stable and profitable business.
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Mobile Threat Defense
The ever-growing pertinence of mobile devices and our increasing dependency meant that the benefits and convenience provided by mobile devices, in both personal and professional world, are matchless and totally extendible.
But on the other hand, mobile devices have the capacity to expose sensitive data to the wrong people who can do us irreparable harm. The risks and threats posed by cyber-criminals, hackers and identity thieves are now dangerously real.
The fact is, as mobile technologies are getting more and more sophisticated, so are the advancements in new attack vectors that the cyber-criminals are exploring to fulfil their malevolent intentions.
However, with the expanding mobile threat landscape, companies too have become aware of the impending attacks and hence have started to embrace a mix of on-premise and cloud-based services to decentralize data storage.
The adoption of next-generation mobile threat defense mechanisms and antivirus solutions can prepare companies to fight against malware-based risks.
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Secure File Sharing
All businesses have varying file sharing needs. Large, multi-regional businesses need to synchronize folders across a large number of sites, whereas small businesses may only need to support a handful of users in a single site.
Construction or similar industry types like advertising firms require
sharing and collaboration with very large (several Gigabytes) files, while financial services or healthcare providers have stringent compliance requirements.
While using third party cloud sharing services can no doubt be fast and efficient, sometimes confidential files that a company has put millions behind is stored on a server that doesn’t belong to them and have no idea where it is located.
The idea of cloud availability also means that not only will that information be stored in a place you do not know, it will also be replicated ten times over and stored around many different data centres so that you will always have a copy.
It is crucial for companies to have control over all of their assets to prevent data leaks. This brings us to secure file sharing platforms such as Infovaultz.
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Domain Security
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an email authentication protocol. It is designed to give email domain owners the ability to protect their domain from unauthorized use, commonly known as email spoofing.
The purpose and primary outcome of implementing DMARC is to protect a domain from being used in business email compromise attacks, phishing emails, email scams and other cyber threat activities.
Once the DMARC DNS entry is published, any receiving email server can authenticate the incoming email based on the instructions published by the domain owner within the DNS entry. If the email passes the authentication, it will be delivered and can be trusted. If the email fails the check, depending on the instructions held within the DMARC record the email could be delivered, quarantined or rejected.
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Data Classification
Data Classification is the concept of arranging information or data into categories based on its level of confidentiality or level of importance.
A system which encompasses data classification means that users are now involved with the efforts of keeping information secure by labelling their information into different levels of confidentiality.
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Anti Phishing
What is anti-phishing protection?
Anti-phishing protection refers to the security measures that individuals and organizations can take to prevent a phishing attack or to mitigate the impact of a successful attack.
Certain anti-phishing protection may block email containing phishing attacks from entering a company’s email system at all. Other anti-phishing protection measures can block users from clicking on links and attachments within an email they have received that might be dangerous.
What is the best anti-phishing solution?
Because no single anti-phishing technology is able to block every phishing attack 100% of the time, the most effective anti-phishing solution to implement a combination of technologies and training.
This multilayered approach should include anti-phishing solutions to block suspicious messages at the email gateway, anti-phishing technology to block suspicious links and attachments in email that has reached the user, and anti-phishing education to help users successfully recognize phishing attacks and other threats.