Monday, June 21, 2021

What to do if you experience a security breach


As a customer of a major company, if you learn that it has had a security breach, or if you find out that your own computer has been compromised, then you need to act quickly to ensure your safety. Remember that a security breach on one account could mean that other accounts are also at risk, especially if they share passwords or if you regularly make transactions between them.


 security breach meaning


If a breach could involve your financial information, notify any banks and financial institutions with which you have accounts.

Change the passwords on all your accounts. If there are security questions and answers or PIN codes attached to the account, you should change these too.

You might consider a credit freeze. This stops anyone using your data for identity theft and borrowing in your name.

Check your credit report to ensure you know if anyone is applying for debt using your details.

Try to find out exactly what data might have been stolen. That will give you an idea of the severity of the situation. For instance, if tax details and SSNs have been stolen, you'll need to act fast to ensure your identity isn't stolen. This is more serious than simply losing your credit card details.

Don'trespond directly to requests from a company to give them personal data after a data breach; it could be a social engineering attack. Take the time to read the news, check the company's website, or even phone their customer service line to check if the requests are legitimate.

Be on your guard for other types of social engineering attacks. For instance, a criminal who has accessed a hotel's accounts, even without financial data, could ring customers asking for feedback on their recent stay. At the end of the call, having established a relationship of trust, the criminal could offer a refund of parking charges and ask for the customer's card number in order to make the payment. Most customers probably wouldn't think twice about providing those details if the call is convincing.

Monitor your accounts for signs of any new activity. If you see transactions that you don't recognize, address them immediately.


Thursday, June 17, 2021

What is software and hardware firewall




Architecturally, a firewall can be software, hardware, or a combination of software and hardware.


different types of firewalls


software firewall

Software firewalls are installed separately on individual devices. It provides more granular control as you can allow access to an app or feature and block others. However, it can be expensive in terms of resources as it uses the CPU and RAM of installed devices and requires administrators to configure and manage them for each device individually. Also, not all devices within an intranet are compatible with a single software firewall and multiple firewalls may be required.


hardware firewall

A hardware firewall, on the other hand, is a physical device, each with its own computing resources. It acts as a gateway between your internal network and the Internet, holding data packets and traffic requests from untrusted sources outside your private network. Physical firewalls are great for organizations with many devices on the same network. It blocks malicious traffic long before it reaches the endpoint, but does not provide security against insider attacks. Therefore, a combination of software and hardware firewalls can provide the best security for an organization's network.


Four types of firewalls

Firewalls are classified by how they work, and they can be installed as any type of software or physical device. There are four types of firewalls, depending on how they work.


1. Packet Filtering Firewall

Packet filtering firewalls are the oldest and most basic type of firewall. Data packets running at the network layer are checked against predefined rules for source IP and destination IP, protocol, source port, and destination port to determine whether a packet is forwarded or dropped. Packet filtering firewalls are stateless by default and monitor each packet independently, without tracking established connections or packets that have previously passed through those connections. As a result, the capabilities of these firewalls to protect against advanced threats and attacks are very limited.


Packet filtering firewalls are fast, inexpensive, and effective. However, the security they provide is very basic. These firewalls cannot protect against malicious data packets from trusted source IPs because they cannot inspect the contents of data packets. Because it is stateless, it is also vulnerable to resource redirection attacks and chip attacks. However, despite their minimal functionality, packet filtering firewalls have paved the way for modern firewalls that offer stronger and deeper security.


2. Circuit Level Gateway

Circuit-level gateways operating at the session layer control established Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections and monitor active sessions. It is very similar to a packet filtering firewall in that it performs a single inspection and uses minimal resources. However, it operates at a higher layer of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. First, it determines the security of the established connection. When an internal device initiates a connection with a remote host, a circuit-level gateway establishes a virtual connection to the internal device name, keeping the internal user's identity and IP address confidential.


Circuit-level gateways are cost-effective, simple, and have little impact on network performance. However, since you have no control over the contents of the data packet, it becomes a flawed security solution on its own. With a legitimate TCP handshake, data packets containing malware can easily bypass circuit-level gateways. Therefore, for additional protection, other types of firewalls are often configured over circuit-level gateways.


3. Stateful Firewall

One step ahead of circuit-level gateways, stateful firewalls not only verify and monitor established connections, but also perform packet inspection, providing better and more comprehensive security. It works by creating a state table with source IP, destination IP, source port and destination port when a connection is established. Based on this information, it dynamically creates its own rules to allow expected inbound network traffic, rather than relying on a set of hard-coded rules. Easily drop data packets that do not belong to verified active connections.


A stateful firewall determines which data packets can pass by checking source and destination IPs and legitimate connections. These additional checks provide more security, but can consume a lot of system resources and slow traffic significantly. Therefore, it is vulnerable to distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS).


Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Benefits of managed services

 Benefits of managed services


Managed services provide several benefits.


Better Cost Control - The cost factor of a business service depends entirely on your organization's requirements for the availability and importance of a particular service. The typical cost components of the IT department, including training, equipment, and personnel, are handled by the MSP and provided to the company on a monthly basis. This will help you effectively estimate more costs each month while budgeting. Depending on future requirements and the pace of your organization's IT maturity, managed services can scale to handle these scenarios. The biggest benefit is that the company can decide how big to scale based on factors that may include financing.


services delivery model


Advanced Risk Management - Every business carries a certain amount of risk, which can be minimized by reducing the individual risks associated with each business service identified as critical. MSPs contribute to proprietary methodologies and help mitigate risk by providing access to modern infrastructure and software. This allows you to follow best practices and minimize the risks associated with providing services.


High Availability, Efficiency and Efficiency - They say "time is money" of IT services. For optimal company performance, the continuous availability of mission-critical IT services is a top priority for many organizations. Assessing the true cost of downtime is difficult, but it is always a good idea to take precautions to avoid this. In the worst case, reputational risk will potentially undermine public trust when attracting outsiders attention. Clients get better performance with minimal downtime when using managed services.


MSPs are very efficient at delivering IT services in a way that lowers costs and keeps deployment times short while providing high-quality services to businesses.


Forward-Looking IT Services - IT departments always face financial, technical, security and operational challenges. When looking for strategies to minimize spending, many organizations are actively using AMS to take full advantage of seamless service integration without worrying about resource constraints. MSPs are always educating their staff on upcoming new releases as well as new technologies that can solve years of costs. Businesses increase predictability, reduce operational risks and issues, and minimize service disruptions.


Managed service providers provide a predictable service model and cost-effective way to deliver new IT services to organizations quickly and effectively, as well as provide stability and peace of mind for both IT and business leaders. Providing new business services to businesses while controlling costs is a daunting task in today's business environment. Managed services are a good strategy to help IT organizations be very flexible and cost predictable from fiscal year to fiscal year. MSPs free up these valuable resources to manage and deliver the strategic IT programs needed to advance business goals, rather than complement and replace existing staff. In large organizations, MSPs help focus resources on more strategic projects.


As you start investing in new applications, take advantage of a range of managed services to understand your IT business needs and minimize unstructured risks.


Thursday, June 10, 2021

Types of security breaches

 


A security breach is often a hallmark of an attack vector used to gain access to a protected system or data. Here are some common types of attacks used to perform security breaches: For more information on these attacks, see our in-depth post on cybersecurity threats.


security breach meaning


Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) — Attackers take control of large numbers of devices to form botnets and use them to flood target systems with traffic, overwhelming bandwidth and system resources. Although DDoS is not a direct means of compromising an organization's systems, it can be used as a deterrent during an actual compromise by an attacker.

MitM (Man in the middle) - An attacker intercepts communication between a user and a target machine, impersonating the user or target machine and using it to steal credentials or data. This can allow you to obtain unauthorized data or perform illegal actions.

Social Engineering - Attackers manipulate users or employees of an organization to trick them into exposing sensitive data. A common attack method is phishing. Phishing is when an attacker sends fake emails or messages that force users to reply with personal information, click links to malicious sites, or download malicious attachments.

Malware and Ransomware — Attackers can infect target systems or endpoints connected to a protected system with malicious software called malware. Malware can be injected by exploiting social engineering, software vulnerabilities, or by leveraging weak authentication. Malware can be used to compromise computer systems, gain remote control, or corrupt or delete content, as in ransomware attacks.

Password Attacks — Attackers can use bots along with common password lists or stolen credentials to guess passwords and compromise accounts on target systems. Typically this is done against a normal account with limited privileges, and an attacker performs a lateral move to compromise an account with additional privileges.

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) - While most cyber attacks are automated and fail to identify victims, APTs are systematic, targeted attacks against specific organizations. It is performed over weeks or months by a team of experienced threat actors and may involve a combination of several advanced attack techniques.


Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Top 5 Open Source Tools For Security Operations (Soc)


As we know, the construction of a security operations center (SOC) has many moving parts. From a technological point of view, it is very important to have open source to identify threats and reduce costs. From a DiD (defense in depth) point of view, there are many devices and technologies that must be used to create the SOC. Based on the industry experience below, the technologies can be used to create an appropriate SOC to monitor threats and detect anomalies to protect business.


noc vs soc


Mainly, since most attacks come from outside, it is very important to use appropriate controls at the perimeter of the network. By using open source products, we can reduce the cost of the product and support is not essential.


Here are the Best SOC Monitoring Tools


1. IDS / IPS: Snort


The intrusion detection system is very important and is necessary to monitor traffic in order to identify or detect anomalies and attacks. Snort is one of the open source intrusion detection / prevention systems that can perform real-time traffic analysis with packet logging on Internet protocol networks. Snort has 5 important components that help detect attacks.


Packet decoder

Preprocessors

Detection mechanism

Recording and alert system.

Output modules


Using the above components, Snort can detect attacks or probes based on the network, including fingerprint attempts of the operating system, semantic URL attacks, buffer overflows, SMB (Server Message Blocks) and stealth port analysis . It can also detect attacks on web applications, such as SQL injections.


Since Snort is just a mechanism, it requires a graphical interface for easy use, if you are not familiar with the command line, so setting up Snorby is good and it also requires a normal web server application like Apache.


Part of Snort's value is that it can be configured in three different modes: as a network sniffer, packet recorder, or full IDS. As such, it can be at the heart of an automated security system or component along with a variety of commercial products.


2. Vulnerability scanner (OpenVAS)


To be a type of proactive security, it is very important to have a vulnerability scanner to analyze and confirm whether assets are working with critical vulnerabilities that could lead to a security breach or an attack. The Vulnerability Scanner is a product that has several updated scripts that are useful for identifying vulnerabilities in the system or in applications. Regularly check systems, especially external systems or systems connected to the Internet, and make regular corrections.


Tip: For each update or deployment, it is mandatory to ensure that all systems or applications are corrected for existing vulnerabilities.


There are several open source tools with limited licenses, such as OpenVAS. Regular NVT updates are useful for detecting emerging vulnerabilities.


The OpenVAS engine can be used with the Greenbone and Barnyard GUI database to complete the results in the user interface. You can verify the entire system over the network and it is nice to have authenticated verification with domain credentials. Greenbone offers options for creating credentials, hosts, tasks and schedules in the user interface.


3. Nagios

Nagios monitors the network: infrastructure, traffic, and connected servers are part of their basic or extended resources. Like many other open source packages, Nagios is available in free and commercial versions.


Nagios Core is at the heart of the open source project, based on the free open source version. Individual products can be monitored and individual tasks can be done through plugins; There are about 50 "official" plugins developed by Nagios and over 3000 plugins provided by the community.


The Nagios user interface can be changed via an interface to the desktop, web or mobile platform, and configuration can be managed with any of the configuration tools available.


4. Maltego

Maltego is proprietary software used for open source intelligence and forensic analysis, developed by Paterva. Malteg focuses on providing a transform library for uncovered data sources and visualizing this information in a graphical format suitable for link analysis and data mining.


5. Vega

Vega is a free, open source web security scanner and web security platform for testing the security of web applications. Vega can help you find and validate SQL injection, online scripts (XSS), confidential information unintentionally revealed and other vulnerabilities. It is written in Java, based on a graphical interface and works under Linux, OS X and Windows.












Thursday, June 3, 2021

What is Network Security Assessment

 




What if your network is compromised today? Do you know how many recordings were exposed? Can you tell right away that there was a violation? Most importantly, is your network defense adequate to repel or respond to an attack?


Evaluating network security is very important because many organizations are unaware of this fact. According to a report by EY, 76% of organizations increased their security budgets only after major cyberattacks. According to the Ponemon Institute's 2019 Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million.


network security assessment


However, there are ways to measure the impact of an attack before it actually takes damage. This is a network security assessment.


Network security assessments are audited by default. It is a review of the security measures of the network to find vulnerabilities in the system. Such a risk assessment defines the beginning by taking an inventory of assets that could be compromised by malicious actors, understanding how those assets could be compromised, and then determining the actions to be taken to protect those assets.


There are two types of network security assessments. One is a vulnerability assessment that shows an organization's weaknesses, and the other is a penetration test that mimics a real-world attack.


The purpose of a network security assessment is to keep your networks, devices and data secure by uncovering potential entry points for cyber attacks both inside and outside your organization. It's also a way to dodge potential attacks. Penetration testing can test the effectiveness of network defenses and measure the potential impact of an attack on a particular asset. What if a particular system is compromised? What data is exposed? The number of records that are likely to be corrupted. How can I mitigate this attack? Security assessments are delivered dry run in case your network is compromised.


Wednesday, June 2, 2021

How to Improve Security Monitoring in your SOC


To build up a security tasks administration to be proactive, associations require an attitude change, from being observing centered to a method of working that is examination driven and remediation centered. This isn't a simple progress for most security groups, so we should take a gander at why this is and investigate useful strides to help. 


noc vs soc


Security Operations – it's everything about the group 


Most SOC groups include primarily junior tasks staff, with simply 10% being senior designers, modelers, group pioneers, account administrators and venture organizers. Junior security examiners, for example, those on the SOC help work area or rostered onto the checking shift group, watch screens throughout the day, consistently, for alerts and work on SOC innovation stages, for example, the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) framework and the defenselessness the executives framework. 


A critical number of your lesser investigator group are likely new to the job (inside the most recent a year), since the bait of an occupation in cybersecurity reaches out to the more extensive workforce – so security experts normally have understanding on the general ICT administration work area, arrange tasks or in server organization. Despite the fact that the setting of their activity has changed to digital security, the way the SOC examiner job works as far as work process won't have changed that much. A security examiner's commonplace move is spent taking a gander at cautions and security data, and attempting to make sense of: 


The most effective method to process the tremendous number of alerts and admonitions; 


Which cautions are genuine, and which are bogus positives; 


Regardless of whether to raise an episode with the client. 


The expert's activity is generally a difficult assignment. The greater part of the cautions they react to are bogus positives; which increases the value of the association's security strategic, genuine dangers get lost in an outright flood. 


For associations that need to turn out to be increasingly proactive and present danger chasing, security activities groups need the establishment of junior experts running SOC innovation (SIEM and helplessness the executives), yet they likewise need progressively experienced staff, who may know quite a bit about legal sciences and infiltration testing. 


As a SOC administrator you should concentrate on improving computerization, particularly for danger confirmation, in this manner opening up your experts' a great opportunity to concentrate on theory age, examination, revelation and risk destruction. 


Your lesser staff can be guided by the danger chasing group through the initial a year of their vocation to build up a progressively insightful viewpoint, in this manner driving their vocation and concentrating on the examiner job being an apprenticeship job, where future digital security experts become familiar with their exchange. 


Review of the Threat Hunting process 


To decide the aptitudes and abilities required for your new risk chasing group, you have to comprehend the procedure and how it applies to your business. Figure 1 shows a four-advance procedure that lines up with the chase group distinguishing and annihilating dangers, while guaranteeing that similar dangers don't return again later and cause more mischief.



Speculation 


Beginning with a speculation, the danger tracker frames a guess about a potential risk that might be focusing on or previously assaulting your business, for example, a country state on-screen character endeavoring to access your mystery plans or client database. To do as such, the foe may focus on your Internet portal to increase remote access to your frameworks, from where they can dump information from your client database. 


The tracker at that point goes further past this elevated level guess, creating explicit speculations on how the enemy may dispatch the assault. They could, for instance, start with a phishing effort to hoodwink a staff part into surrendering their qualifications, or attempt shakedown against a worker to have them present their favored record subtleties to the assailant, in the event that they have an individual issue or helplessness. In this way, forearmed with this speculation, the chase starts. 


Examination 


The danger tracker presently utilizes every speculation and surveys the association for proof that the strategies utilized by the assailant have been effective. This implies they glance through the information (occasions and security data) for markers of bargain and assault, searching for proof that each instrument or system has been utilized. 


The focal point of this activity is to figure out which markers of potential breaks could demonstrate dangers to have been focusing on or dynamic in the earth. Examiners influence existing logical devices, for example, the SIEM and danger insight arrangements, while presenting extra instruments for information handling and perception that assist make with detecting of the clamor. 


Revelation 


During the following stage, genuine proof of an assaults can be uncovered, and that proof is utilized to manufacture profiles of assaults. The tracker at that point maps out causality and guarantees assaults can't be rehashed in an alternate mode, by understanding the various instruments and methods they may use to accomplish similar goals. 


Expanding on the past model, if the aggressor is utilizing taken qualifications, phished from a staff part utilizing a mock email from the assistance work area, the agent's report can incorporate proof that the business' security mindfulness program is coming up short, while giving extra relationship rules to the SIEM (raise a caution if a client is signed on twice from various geolocations) and limits to screen for over the top volumes of information leaving through the association's Internet passage. It is just through this profundity of investigation that danger chasing is fruitful. 


During the disclosure stage, if the tracker discovers evidence of a genuine assault either in progress of having just occurred, they would hand off at this phase to an episode director. The specialist may stay engaged with dealing with the occurrence, or they might be entrusted to build up the standards and methodologies to ensure this assault can't be fruitful later on. 


Administration Improvement 


Administration improvement comes in toward the finish of the chasing procedure, where a profound comprehension of how an assault occurs (gathered from the past three stages of the chasing procedure) is utilized to elevate the SOC's capacity and improve the capacity to identify comparative assaults later on. The tracker gives directions to the ICT administration supervisory group on the best way to fix security controls and framework examining to ensure the SOC can distinguish and react to that risk all the more successfully later on. 


Instructions to fabricate a Threat Hunting capacity 


You should put resources into your security group's aptitudes and capacities and spotlight on robotizing the ordinary, commonplace assignments of known-risk check, while engaging your group with a proactive dispatch to chase for dangers over the endeavor. 


To get the most incentive from a SOC interest in individuals and diagnostic instruments, for example, a SIEM, your business should concentrate on building an examination administration that utilizes orderly, straight examination procedures to figure out what could occur during an assault. Your group can then effectively going on the chase to search for proof of this assault. 


Chasing is the regular expansion of the procedure model utilized by a SOC yet requests a move from a responsive to proactive culture. By embraced this change, the prizes will more likely than not merit the exertion.



Tuesday, June 1, 2021

Three types of security walls

 


Firewalls are used to prevent unauthorized access by third parties on a private network. These are network security systems (hardware/software based) that monitor and control the flow of traffic between the Internet and a private network according to a set of user-defined rules. Firewalls protect your organization's computer network from unauthorized inbound or outbound access and provide optimal network security.


There are three basic types of firewalls that companies use to protect their data and devices, blocking destructive elements from their networks. Packet filter, health check and proxy server firewall. We will briefly introduce each of them.


different types of firewalls


packet filter

Packet filter firewalls control network access by analyzing outgoing and incoming packets. Allows packets to traverse or block paths against a predetermined criterion, such as allowed IP addresses, packet types, and port numbers, such as: Packet filtering techniques are suitable for small networks, but they become complex when applied to large networks. These firewalls cannot block all kinds of attacks. The application layer cannot exploit vulnerabilities or overcome attacks that fight fraudulent attacks.


status check

Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI), also known as dynamic packet filtering, is a powerful firewall architecture that inspects end-to-end traffic flows. These smart and fast firewalls use smart methods to block unauthorized traffic by analyzing packet headers, providing proxy services and inspecting packet state. These firewalls operate at the network layer of the OSI model and are more secure than basic packet filtering firewalls.


Proxy server firewall

A proxy server firewall, also known as an application-level gateway, is the most secure type of firewall that effectively protects network resources by filtering messages at the application layer. Proxy firewall masks IP addresses and restricts traffic types. They provide a complete protocol-aware security analysis of the protocols they support. A proxy server provides the best internet experience and improves network performance.


This is about a basic firewall configured to protect private networks. Whatever firewall you choose, make sure to check the proper configuration as loopholes can do more harm than good without a firewall. Create a secure network and install appropriate firewalls to restrict access to computers and networks.