discussion 8

Microsoft applications security is what is discussed in chapter 12. Mainly it entails how you can secure your operating system. I found this chapter interesting due to various reasons. It helped me to differentiate between application software and operating system software. Initially, I thought they are more of the same thing but I ended up realizing there is a big difference between the two. Furthermore, I believed securing the operating system fully prevents it from any kind of attack (Ongtang et al., 2014). However, I learnt that just a single vulnerable application may expose the data of entire company to a great risk. The common application software attacks are also mentioned in this chapter.

Dos, Identity spooning, privilege escalation and malformed inputs are considered as the common ones. What interested me in them is all these attacks can be prevented despite how harmful they might be to the applications. Moreover, I understood hardening applications can play a pivotal role in curbing the attacks. Best practices for Microsoft windows and application security is tackled in chapter 15. I found the chapter to be more informative than interesting. I learnt that various big businesses have a Business Continuity Plan (BCP), which ensure the critical functions of the business runs as usual despite interruptions. I found the way computers communicate fascinating too. I had no hint that they use networks to communicate and thus securing a network is very vital (Sinha, 2015).

 However, there are some tasks I found difficult to understand here. For instance, I could not understand how to disable the SSID broadcast for protected wireless networks. In addition, updating the signatures of a database was also tough to understand. Lastly, software testing, staging and deployment was another hard sub-topic. What was discussed in this sub topic was extremely hard for me to understand. The language was complex and the terms used were not easy (Sinha, 2015). The steps given in chapter 12 and 15 are very crucial as far as security is concerned. Nonetheless, I feel that some steps are complex and Microsoft should attempt to make them simpler based on the huge number of users. Besides, they can try using diagrams in some cases to make their elaborations effective.

References

Ongtang, M., McLaughlin, S., Enck, W., & McDaniel, P. (2014). Semantically rich application‐centric security in Android. Security and Communication Networks.

Sinha, A. (2015). U.S. Patent No. 9,119,017. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.