Network Security and Why You Need It
Network Security and Why You Need It
Network Security and Why You Need It
Does your company store customer data, such as medical records or account information, through an electronic information system? If so, your business needs to have a network security policy in place. Without one, you will likely experience a security breach, have information stolen, or face lawsuits or government fines. Rather than taking a risk, develop an effective network security policy that incorporates regular assessments.
Network security, in general, covers all activities pertaining to data on a system: usability, reliability, integrity, and safety. Because a threat can come from any angle, your system needs a multilayer security approach through hardware, software, management, and regular updates. Some of the procedures for a safe network are familiar to the average person, such as installing antivirus and anti-spyware programs and adding a firewall Intrusion Prevention System (IPS).
A Network security policy, beyond a technical level, increases your business's trustworthiness with customers and clients. With an effective security policy, your company is less prone to security breaches and assures customers that their information will not be exploited. Additionally, your business will comply with industry best practices, such as FFIEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA.
A security policy needs to go beyond the technical level and must consider physical and personal threats. A criminal may take another strategy and contact employees by telephone or email or physically enter the facility. Hackers and other online criminals, as well, are always creating new schemes, and if your network is not properly reviewed and up to date, your firewall could be broken by such attacks, and your information stolen and exploited. Because employees are not always aware of such technical, physical, or social engineering tactics used for security breach, your network needs to be prepared to face any outside or internal threats.
Although threats change and have taken several forms, networks face a handful of common threats. Viruses and worms come in the form of emails and insert malicious code onto a system. Trojan horses, similarly, are malicious code that arrives through a file through an email, website, link, or software and are easier to prevent than to remove. Spam, however, seems harmless but, through a virus, can turn a device on your system into a "zombie" computer, which sends out thousands of emails and creates a bottleneck on a network. Ultimately, a zombie computer may slow down or disable your system.
Phishing and packet sniffers specifically usurp password and other personal information. Using social engineering concepts, phishing schemes usually come through an email but telephone calls from an authentic-seeming source are also possible and, by thinking he or she just received correspondence from a bank or similar institution, the internet user gives away password or account information. Packet sniffers, on the other hand, monitor a network by gaining access to a user's computer and steal password and account information by analyzing data streams.
A network assessment, or audit, identifies potential gateways for threats, also called vulnerabilities. Network assessment, however, involves ethical, or "white hat," hacking techniques to identify these points. Through penetration tests, interviewing employees, vulnerability scans, analyzing operating systems, and examining network history, a team of network security experts thoroughly looks at the perimeter and inside of a system and then compiles a report with all findings and steps for fixing them.
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