Importance of Information Security
“With the number of Cyber threats growing in a big way, more and more answers are emerging to the question, why is Information Security important?”
Why is Information Security important all of a sudden? Not that long ago, it was primarily something for only the techies to worry about. Corporate’s widely view it as the responsibility of their IT department.
Information Security is important because without any understanding or consideration of the issue you are waiting to be attacked. It may not happen now, or next week, but eventually you will be breached, and you will have to deal with the fallout. Your data and is one of your most valuable assets and yet often one of your most vulnerable.
Information security is important in any organizations such as business, records keeping, financial, healthcare and so on. This information security will help the organizations to fulfill the needs of the customers in managing their personal information, data, and security information. There are some challenges faced by the organizations in managing the information so that it would fall in hand of unauthorized person or hackers. Other than that, all organizations must have their policies in secure their information so that the information can be kept safely.
With so many hackers dedicated to developing their cyber security skills, it is crucial to take all the preemptive measures necessary to protect your business from a potential breach.
To protect the data and business critical of an organization one must have two best offensive and defensive security approaches.
Offensive Security approach
When many people think about offensive security, they think about a bunch of guys with black hoodie sitting with a laptop having black and green terminal doing some illegal hacks. But the Cyber Security world has evolved a lot beyond this old school hacker stereotype.
In real world Offensive Security approach is much of Red Team operations, Vulnerability Assessment and penetration testing which are done by ethical hackers and security professional with great knowledge.
A Red Team is a group of ethical hackers with top level offensive knowledge who can simulate a cyber attack such as an Advance persistent threat (APT). These teams can help an organization to develop their skill during an event of real breach. These simulated attack enables security engineers to test their incident response strategy and identify gaps and fix them.
Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing (VA|PT) is the common element of offensive security. A Vulnerability assessment identifies flaws and categorizes them by severity based on the severity of the asset which then provides in deep analysis of security weakness, flaws and the mitigation method. There are different VA|PT methods like White Box Testing, Grey Box testing and Black Box Testing.
Blind penetration testing is the case, the pen tester is only given the name of the organization, so that the system security professionals of the target company gets a real-time look. The security team will be knowing about the pen testers and the attack. Pen tester will be trying to breach, and the security team will be defending them.
Double blind penetration testing happens with a little surprise. Neither the pen tester or the security team won’t be knowing anything or when the attack happens. It will be just like real time cyber-attack.
Black box Testing is totally different from white box and grey box testing. It requires no previous information and usually takes the approach just like a hacker from outside without any information provided. In a black box penetration test the penetration tester must find all the information of the organization’s infrastructure, network, firewall and other vital details to successfully penetrate into it.
Grey box Testing is in between black box and white box testing. In this scenario, the tester may receive architectural diagrams, credentials, demonstrations of the application, communication with the target, and much more. This is because the tester is not given everything while giving him access to more of the application. Grey box tests can require very little information to perform. A tester just needs to know the target URL(s) and have some credentials to access the application. Additionally, architecture diagrams or other information can be provided if needed.
Defensive Security approach
Defensive security is nothing but defending attacks or breach. Mostly these works are done by the Blue Team of an organization. Defending during blind and double-blind penetration testing is also a defensive security approach
A Blue Team is a company’s own cyber security team, typically within a Security Operations Center (SOC). The SOC consists of highly trained analysts who work on defending and improving their organisation’s defenses around the clock.
The blue team is expected to detect, oppose and weaken the red team. There will be lot of mock attack scenario designed to enhance their skills by preparing them for dangerous real-world attacks.
Defensive security is most needed in an organization as they are the first responders. They not only defend but also does patch management.
White box Testing , also known as clear box testing or glass box testing, is a penetration testing approach that uses the knowledge of the internals of the target system to elaborate the test cases. In application penetration tests the source code of the application is usually provided along with design information, interviews with developers. In infrastructure penetration tests network maps, infrastructure details, etc. are provided. The goal of a white box penetration test is to provide as much information as possible to the penetration tester so that they can gain full understanding of the system and do a full scope test based on it. Secure coding, is one of the major elements in software development, and secure code reviews plays significance role with regards to White box testing.
