The Golden Rules of Cyber Security

--Originally published at lazynesstothemax

All cyber security programs or protocols follow three rules and have to address at least one of them. These are:

  • Integrity
  • Availability
  • Confidentiality

Security professionals, when creating a procedure, must consider them in order to successfully protect the computer, network or system they are working on.

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Cyber Integrity

As time goes on, hackers get more knowledge and tools that help them get access and alter data from the systems they attack. This may leave corrupted data or changed programs on their trail. This affects the functionality of the system as well as the safety and profitability of it. For that reason, Cyber integrity is very important, and a security professional has to have the tools and programs necessary to check if the programs weren’t altered or modified from a desired state to a non functional or not secure state.

There are different ways to attend this matter and to mentions some of them, there is the inventory management, policy enforcement, backup and recovery, analytics and reporting.

Inventory management refers to have a monitored way of checking all files and programs and checking the creators, editors and dates that the file changed. This way you can have a closer look to the meta data of the files and know if there were unwanted changes or if files are missing.

Policy enforcement can refer to keeping good standards that apply to all files in order to know if the file follows said standards and can be considered as a good file and not an altered one by an unknown author.

It is good to always have backups of the state of the system, and if a node fails in the integrity standard then to restored it with a desired previous state.

It is always good and useful to have analytic tools that

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the state of the files and changed made to them in order to know when something is unfamiliar or strange and  basicly know where to look when you seek mistakes in the system that may alter the functionality and the service the system provides.

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Availability

When availability is the concern, we will always, or most of the time, think about the hardware. How can we keep all the hardware running in the desired way. We have to maintain all nodes of the hardware online and functional and have to have ways of making repairs immediately when necessary.

It is also necessary to keep all current upgrades on our system so applications don’t crash when the upgrade is needed. We have to always seek to use the fastest and adaptive disaster recovery plans on different possible scenarios. They may have not happen yet, but if the occasion present itself we have to be prepared.

And if data is on the risk of being lost or destroyed, we always need to backup our information so we may recover from a disaster of that nature.

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Confidentiality

Confidentiality is a synonym for privacy. We don’t want to share every piece of data we use in our system. Some of this data may be crucial to the company and must be access only by a few authorized group of people. We have to make our system capable of keeping this sensible information from the wrong hands. This information may be the target of hackers and criminals that seek to attack your company. Therefore, we need to be prepared when this happens and prevent the attackers from obtaining important data.

The most common way of protecting information is encryption. To use tokens and keys to manage files and decrypt them if necessary and don’t worry too much if the data gets stolen because the attackers wont be avaible to make much sense out of it.

There are other ways of implementing confidentiality in a more physical manner. To have special nodes on a different network or to manage this information in an offline storage device.

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All this said. There are many things that are involved in cyber security but everything ends up either in the topic of integrity, confidentiality or availability and as an aspirant cyber security professional, I have to deeply study this three golden rules to understand more about the cyber world and how to protect our systems and our data.

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