Security Design is the Most Critical Step in Preventing Attacks

Having great security applications and appliances to protect your business from cyber attacks is a great second step. What’s more important for the first step, is the design and maintenance of a robust and resilient information security (InfoSec) infrastructure. This is more important because it defines how all the hardware and software will be functionally integrated together to protect your business from all aspects of security breaches.

Here is an experience I encountered several years ago during an InfoSec assessment: One of my consulting clients had all the latest and greatest appliances and technologies installed and running to protect their infrastructure. At that time, internet backbone performance was improving dramatically on a regular basis. In order to keep their company at the latest fastest speeds, my client was implementing an internet circuit upgrade. During this upgrade, one of the IT engineers forgot to shutdown / decommission the old internet circuit, exposing the old circuit to both their internal network and the unprotected outside world. This enabled their company network to become a transit for all public internet traffic and, as a result, their company was highly vulnerable to cyber attacks.

If the client had originally designed their infrastructure to include all appliances and integration policies, they would have avoided this serious security risk. Additionally, if they had instituted best practices for the maintenance and verification of changes to their infrastructure, this would have also prevented the risk. This is just one example of many situations I encountered like this.

The lesson I hope you remember: Take the time to ensure you have a strong InfoSec design in place, so your appliances are working as efficiently and effectively as possible to provide the best possible security for your business. The design should also include best practices to ensure it is well maintained and assessed periodically.

Stay tuned for more experiences I hope will help you keep your business safe and secure against evolving vulnerabilities and cyber attacks.