Security: Protect Your Assets

If you really want to protect your network, then you must keep
in mind that its not a question of if, but when, someone will try to get into
it. Thats why its important to be prepared. There are many ways to do
this, the best being to try to break into it yourself. There are umpteen tools
to help you with the task. But, besides tools, you must also do many other
things to secure your network. Lets look at some of them.

Enforce Security Policies

Software tools alone wont be able to protect your network from being
attacked. Youll also need to put policies in place. How do you know that you
dont have a disgruntled employee sending your trade secrets to competition.
One way is to monitor all such activities, and the other is to prevent their
usage in the company altogether. So, ensure that all official correspondence is
performed through your companys official email accounts.

Look out for Trouble

One thing that must be done is to keep track of how your systems behave
under normal usage conditions. Anything that causes this normal activity to be
disrupted is a signal that somethings wrong. The systems CPU usage has
suddenly shot up, or has become too idle. There is excessive network traffic on
your network all of a sudden. Your Web servers response time is too slow.
These are all indicators that somethings wrong. The best thing to do in such
cases is to keep a regular track of the log files in all your critical systems.
This is a fairly difficult task considering that the log files of even an
ordinary desktop could have hundreds of thousands of events logged. One solution
to this problem is to use Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). There are two types
of IDS: network-based and host-based. The latter monitors the events and log
files from a particular system on the network. The former tracks all network
activity and can detect an attack while its in progress.

Delete Sensitive Data

Ensure that the sensitive data you dont need anymore is deleted from the
system properly even from the Recycle Bin. There are also tools that can
completely wipe out the data from a storage source. However, there are ways of
recovering data even from a formatted hard drive. In such cases, an easy
solution is a low-level format of the drive.

Good Training

Firewalls are great to keep external intruders from getting inside your
network. Tools like network monitors, IDS, and packet sniffers are great to keep
a tab of internal network activities. Unfortunately, most corporate espionage
goes beyond using these tools. Ensure that some simple ground rules are followed
such as identification of what information can and cant be given over the
phone, email or other communication channels.