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Improve Your Network Security Posture

By Atchison Frazer, Brian Dennis

December 20, 2007 — CSO —

In the contemporary enterprise, the responsibilities of executives in finance, legal, IT and, most importantly, those with a special duty of care and loyalty to the best interests of shareholders, the so-called “fiduciaries” of a publicly traded corporation, have become quite blurred. The threats to a corporation’s security are changing so quickly that it is difficult to determine what steps are required to ensure that a company is both secure and legally compliant.

Even a corporation that has a mature security program, including several levels of security, strictly enforced policies and regularly scheduled audits, still faces a number of potential threats that can either bring down the network or increase security risks and create legal liabilities. It is important to remember the delta between the loss of business value as a result of an attack versus the savings from taking all imaginable precautions.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), for example, compels corporations to conduct risk assessments that identify “reasonably foreseeable internal and external risks” while monitoring the efficacy of IT systems’ agility in “detecting, preventing and responding to attacks, intrusions or other [vulnerabilities].”

The following five areas are some of the most important risk factors companies must address to maintain compliance and a security-hardened risk posture:

Risk 1. Constant change in the nature of attacks and windows of vulnerability from mash-ups and other Web 2.0 apps. Every component or device (hardware/software) deployed is not scrutinized in three key areas before becoming part of your infrastructure circumference.

Augmentation: Can the device work transparently to provide an additional feature without radical changes in the current network architecture? Can the device functionality be virtualized without exposing interfaces to attack? Is data from disparate devices captured, aggregated and analyzed for event correlation defenses?

Ease of use: Every device takes time to learn, but the cost of additional training mitigates the savings incurred by the additional functionality the device is perceived to bring to your environment. In other words, does the complexity and redundancy of devices increase human latency and the possibility for error that hackers and social engineers can subsequently exploit?

Flexibility: Implement modularity in terms of what services can be placed on the network to mirror the nature of the latest threat, as well as the ability to do so quickly by simply activating incremental features and functionality on demand.

Risk 2. Weak links in the security value chain and business process activity monitors.

Departmental edges: Departmental edges are vulnerable to users in other departments, especially if the network segmentation strategy calls for deploying a router at the edge internally between executive departments and the Internet, and other primary subnet domains.