Every business encircles the frame of tangible assests of the company activities in order to get a clear picture of the security risks they encounter and how to best deal with these threats.
After drawing the necessary and acceptable boundaries one must choose the various tools by means of which network security is achieved: firewalls and proxy servers, encryption, logical security and access controls, anti-virus software, and auditing systems such as log management, etc.
Firewalls are a very basic part of network security. Firewalls flow through a system trying to authenticate, monitor and report traffic.
The process of encryption involves encoding that is converting a simple text into a number of unreadable characters or codes. If the encrypted text is stolen in transit, the content is unreadable to the viewer. Logical security comprises software security measures for an organization’s systems, such as ID and password access, authentication, access rights and authority levels. These measures are to make sure that network or a workstation activities are performed by only authorized users.
Application Security rotates around these three main functions:
- Programming
- Processing
- Access
Having physical access such as electronic, security guards, choke and cameras is very important to provide the security of your applications and data.
With processing it is important that the procedure monitors and reveals falsified and incomplete data, incomplete processing, duplicate transactions processing simultaneously in one and the same place. Finally, access, it is important to realize that maintaining network security against illegal access is one of the main goals for companies as threats can come from a few sources. It is very important to change system access passwords regularly and to track the made changes. The second point to be concerned with is remote access, people accessing your system from the outside through the internet. Setting up firewalls and password protection to on-line data changes are apt to protect against unauthorized remote access.
Among the specific tools used in network security you should get to know about Nsauditor Software to secure your network.
This is a network security scanner that allows to audit and monitor remote network computers for possible vulnerabilities, checks your network for all potential methods that a hacker might use to attack it. Nsauditor is a complete networking utilities package that includes a wide range of tools for network security auditing, scanning, monitoring and more. The program includes more than 45 network tools for scanning, sniffing, enumerating and gaining access to machines and contains a built-in database of known network security vulnerabilities, which allows you to select the items for scanning and add custom entries. Nsauditor can reveal and catalog a variety of information, including installed software, shares, users, drives, hotfixes, NetBios, RPC, SQL and SNMP information, open ports. Reports can be generated in HTML and XML format.
ShareAlarmPro includes folder watcher functions. You can perform folder monitoring and folder content change tracking. With ShareAlarmPro you can centralize all alarms, thus having the opportunity to monitor several shares on multiple servers from a single location. Work stations.
The program logs all detected events (access to shared folders, security events, folder watcher events ) in an HTML format.
Here are represented some common security threats that will surely help you to get started in creating your company's threat list:
• To make stronger the currently used computer and network passwords,records of physical assets. Do they exist? Are they backed up?
• Data backups
• Logging of data access. The time someone accesses data, it is this logged, what, when, where, etc, all the info is recorded.
• Access to sensitive customer data, e.g., credit card info. To verify if this information be accessed from personalities outside.
• Access to client lists. If there exists a backdoor access into the client database.
• Emails. Employees need to be educated on how to spot potential spam and if there is a company policy that outgoing emails to clients not have certain types of hyperlinks in them?
Each company should develop a complete list of all the assets, prioritize the ones necessary ones specific for him accordingly.
• Developing Your Security Threat Response Plan
• Implementing Network Access Controls
Which should also include steps such as; encryption, digital signatures, ACLs, verifying IP addresses, user names, and checking cookies for web pages.
A very critical approach towards the possessed resources and evaluation of Security controls requires the auditor to look at a system with the eyes of a hacker and imagine how things could be arranged to acquire unauthorized access. The system should be monitored and tested appropriately.
Evaluating security controls requires testing three elements: people, process, and technology. Because of the weakness of each of these bonds an organization may become very vulnerable to attack.
Summing up, Security controls are the guarantees that a business uses to reduce risk and protect assets. Policy determines what security controls are needed, and those controls are selected by identifying a risk and choosing the appropriate countermeasure that reduces the impact of an undesirable event. The evaluation of security controls in its simplest form validates whether or not the control adequately addresses policy, best practice and law. Testing security controls for effectiveness and measuring them against standards are of the best ways to help an organization meet its obligations to shareholders and regulatory responsibilities.

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Article Submited by Karine Iskandarya