Telecommunications Case Assignment

Threats

Ten years ago, major of malicious threats were waged against operating systems. Today, the focus is on applications and mainly browsers. We now see a lot of hacking, targeted attacks against companies, viruses that target credit card numbers, bank account information and Social Security numbers, DoS attacks, and root kits that turn hosts into zombies.

In the future, you will see more resilient networks that mitigate the risk of traffic-based attacks, more secure operating systems and applications to resist malware, and intrusion prevention systems that will respond instantly to attacks, choking them off before they can damage your infrastructure.

Firewall Capabilities

Firewalls have been adding capabilities since they were first introduced. Early firewalls contained some limited filtering and NAT capabilities, and not much else. Today’s firewalls offer a wide range of capabilities and specialties, which we will discuss later in the chapter.

Encryption

Encryption is a standard that is constantly evolving. We have gone from DES, a 56-bit algorithm, to 3DES, an effective 168-bit algorithm, to AES, which supports a 256-bit algorithm.

Encryption’s popularity has been growing as concerns with respect to protecting data at rest, in transit, and while archived. The key to keep in mind as you look into encryption solutions is ensuring they support AES or an equivalent algorithm, and be sure that you encrypt your data everywhere it is vulnerable.

Authentication

Another area where you can expect to see dramatic changes in future capabilities is in authentication, especially with respect to identity and access management.

One trend is moving away from passwords to tokens, smart cards, and biometric authentication as a replacement or supplement to existing user ID and password solutions.

Identity and account management solutions provide automation, full account life cycle management, and associated auditing. However, the solutions are complex to install and maintain.

Metrics

Trend has been moving toward metrics and is expected to continue. There are now a number of standards available for generating metrics. The most popular is ITIL, the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, which is a set of concepts you can use to formalize your security management practice and the associated reporting.

Industry Focus

What is the industry focused on securing? Initially, information security was about keeping the bad guys out of your network.

Focus shifted from network to host: patch management, hardening operating systems, and installing host-based firewalls.

Attackers shifted to attacking applications on our hosts, so we focused on integrating security into the software development life cycle, penetration testing, and firewall and proxy server deployment.

Next shift in focus for information security is on data. Industry heading towards a data-centric security model, a significant paradigm shift from previous models. A data-centric model will force companies to focus on classifying and applying values to their data.

Securing the Cloud

You have to trust the vendor providing your cloud. This requires a shift in focus from deploying security technologies to ensuring your vendors are contractually obligated to keep your data secure. You also need to be able to evaluate vendors to determine how trustworthy they are, and if you have the available resources, you should be auditing the vendor(s) to ensure they continue to keep your data secure.

Securing Mobile Devices

There are already virus protection, mobile device management, and encryption applications available for mobile devices. The challenge you’ll typically see in both current and future implementations is that these types of devices are frequently overlooked or discounted when security risks are being documented. Be sure to keep these on your list of risks – there is an alarming amount of storage and processing capacity on these devices, which makes it easy for an employee to put confidential information on them without thinking twice about it.

 IPv6 Support IPv6 includes a native information security framework (IPsec) which provides for both data and control packets. This means that what you currently do with a traditional VPN you will be able to do natively with any IPv6 device. At a high level that means you can run your IPsec VPN without requiring a client, but the implications are significantly more profound than just that. In a fully IPv6 environment, any connection can be configured to utilize an IPsec connection. This means that any connection from a user to an application, host-to-host, or even peer-to-peer connection will be authenticated and encrypted as it passed across the network.

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Firewall Management Best Practices

Create a written firewall policy

Evaluate potential and known threats

Confirm that the existing firewall policy and setup is sufficient or correct based on known threats

Maintain physical security control over all access to firewalls

Limit and filter Internet connectivity

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Network Security, Firewalls, and VPNs

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