Operations Security

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From the course by University System of Georgia

Cybersecurity and Its Ten Domains

1003 ratings

University System of Georgia

Cybersecurity and Its Ten Domains

1003 ratings

This course is designed to introduce students, working professionals and the community to the exciting field of cybersecurity. Throughout the MOOC, participants will engage in community discourse and online interaction. Participants will gain knowledge and understanding of cybersecurity and its domains. They will engage with expertly produced videos, gain insight from industry experts, participate in knowledge assessments, practice assessing their environmental awareness, and gain access to materials that address governance and risk management, compliance, business continuity and disaster recovery, cryptography, software development security, access control, network security, security architecture, security operations, and physical and environmental security. Learning will be assessed using strategies aligned to knowledge and understanding. You do not need prior experience in IT security to do well in this course. All you need is a willingness to learn. We will point you to relevant open and free resources to assist you. At the end of this course, you will have the option of applying for undergraduate level course credit at Kennesaw State University (dependent on admission to Kennesaw State University as a degree seeking or a non-degree seeking student). More information is available in final module "Receive Course (undergraduate) Credit at Kennesaw State University".

From the lesson

Operations Security & Physical and Environmental Security

In this module we are going to cover what amount to some of the more intuitive parts of cybersecurity: operations security and physical and environmental security. Learners will understand operations security from a competitor/enemy/hacker’s viewpoint and then develop and apply countermeasures accordingly. Learners will also be exposed to electric power issues such as brownouts, fire detection and suppression, and HVAC.

Operations Security4:09

Physical and Environmental Security1:14

Meet the Instructors

Dr. Humayun Zafar
Associate Professor of Information Security and Assurance
Information Systems

[MUSIC]

Hi, I'm Justin Massey and I'm a Penetration Tester from Coalfire Labs.

Today we'll be discussing security operations.

[SOUND] Security operations are typically defined in a security policy and

include your common buzzwords, such as,

[SOUND] the principle of least privilege and patch management.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, this policy is poorly implemented and

thus increases the overall risk.

[SOUND] For example, a company policy may read,

all employees are only permitted user access and no administrator or

root privileges are granted, unless they are a system administrator.

However, users are bugging the system administrator to install software on their

local machines, and it begins to grant the user local administrator access to make

his job easier.

The employees are now free to install whatever software they wish, and

oftentimes this leads to malware being installed on workstations.

Furthermore, this can lead to devastating impact on the organization,

such as crypto locker,

encrypting all of the shared drives which the domain user has write access to.

[SOUND] It is absolutely necessary for

the security team to audit the user permissions and

assure the principle of least privilege is being implemented correctly.

Another important role of security operations is to ensure sensitive

information is properly identified, handled and secured.

Also, when sensitive data is no longer needed for business purposes or

required by law, it is necessary to destroy the information.

The concept is great, but could be difficult to implement.

If all system information is stored in one location, one can review the data and

determine if it should be destroyed.

[NOISE] In our current day of computing, this is not the case.

Sensitive data can often be stored on individual's computers rather than

a database where it can be easily queried.

[NOISE] For example, a comptroller of an organization is required to

run tax reports at the end of each year and

stores the W2s on a mapped network drive for easy access when needed.

The comptroller continues to store them in this location each year for

the years to come.

If this drive is compromised, the personally identifiable

information of the employees is attained by the threat agent and

exfiltrated to engage in tax fraud of all of the employees.

Educating the employees about proper data handling is a must for all organizations.

[SOUND] Media management is yet another security nightmare for organizations.

Employees have the need to move data to and from their work location.

And an easy way to do this is by a USB flash drive.

Unfortunately, no encryption mechanism is built into the hardware and

the operating systems also do not support any encryption by default.

For your average user, this means that the data stored in the flash drive

is in clear text, and readable by anyone who can obtain the flash drive.

[SOUND] There are many other examples of security operations, but

the underlying problem lies within the implementation of the policy.

Audits are necessary to ensure the policy is being implemented properly.

But the audit [SOUND] must be inclusive of all assets, and

not only where the company thinks the data may reside.

As part of the audit, it may be necessary to complete a vulnerability assessment,

and correlate it to prior year's assessments,

review default configurations, and scrutinize the change management logs.

With all this being said, a well implemented security operation starts with

training the users and system administrators, and ends with

the same people properly following those clearly defined procedures.

[MUSIC]

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