Attack Prevention

ATACK PREVENTION

Carlos CamachoColon

CMGT 421

November 9, 2014

Vance Collins

     There is never enough precaution to avoid an attack to your organization system server or to attempt to obtain clients and user personal information.  But there is no doubt about there are certain securities measures that we, as administrator, can do to avoid those attacks to happen or detour the intruder to attempted it.  According to Lee, 2014, October 2, threat intelligence requires organizations to understand themselves first and then understand the adversary (admittedly, a very Sun Tzu styled approach).

     It is always the norm of an organization that developers take in consideration the security risk of any application as well as security programmer need to do a security assessment of the application and consequence if that application get attacked.  But before either of them can do anything is better to understand the organization assets, infrastructure, personnel and business operations.  By assuming this approach the organization can easily identify the intention of any outside intruder, and why they may be interested in the organization; the main objective is to prevent an attack from internal or external sources.

     The question is, what is threat? What sources I have to combat threat and keep the organization safe?  First let define threat, Merriam-Webster define it as “someone or something that could cause trouble, harm, etc.”.   For a threat to occurred certain conditions or situations must be present, in these case there are three conditions must be present.  These conditions are the intent, capability, and opportunity, making the assumption that if any of the three conditions is missing the threat will no occur or the percentage to happen is minimum.  The intent is the action of targeting in specific the organization; capability the word itself define have the ability to execute the intention; and finally the opportunity, is the vulnerability of the organization internal, external or software.  

        Now, that we have define threat what sources are available to prevent an attack to the organization?  During my search I found one that caught my attention, Attack Surface Analysis.  One reason select this analytical way to protect the organization from attack is because it design to work with the developer and application to help us having a better understanding in how to analyze system and the possible vulnerabilities when creating an application, also how to protected from a possible attack.  It concentrated on what function and part of system need to be review; identify what areas of the codes require special attention and system areas need to be protected. One disadvantage of Attack Surface Analysis is the assumptions of internal attacks are different from external attacks.  I disagree with that part, because if you take for example recent attacks like, Target, Home Depot and recently Postal Office.  Each of this attack the suspicious of internal access was the origin of the attack or the way of the hacker enter the system for that reason I disagree with it.