Planning the organization’s network to be immune against various types of attacks is not an easy task, but it can be achieved. There are several measures to take, starting from hardening the communication equipment and to restrict the access to it, to identify suspicious traffic patterns in the network, to verify the configuration of the communications protocols and more.
Information systems protection is not just firewalling and end-user protection software (EPS). When protecting the communications network, various types of attacks that can disrupt network operation should be prevented, such as attacks that disable network communications equipment, attacks that cause routers not to forward traffic to the destination, DDoS attacks on servers and communication lines, impersonating legitimate users to steal information, eavesdropping web traffic and more, but I’ll start with a story from a few years ago.
A few years ago, in the network of a medium-size enterprise customer, they were about to purchase a end-user protection software at a cost of about fifty dollars per end PC per year, so for around of thousand end users, it gave them a sum of fifty thousand dollars per year. Before going to this adventure, I asked the customer to check his existing software’s, and to verify that these features they were about to purchase does not already exist. In a comparative examination of about more than a hundred protection features of the five systems that already existed and the licenses for them were renewed every year, it turns out that nearly all the features that was promised to the customer already exist in the software they had, and only had to activate and configure them for operation. Simply put, the customer was about to purchase another white elephant to join the herd of sleepy elephants they had already purchased.
Against any attack there are protective measures that can be taken, whether it is in encryption, smart confession of users, listening to suspicious events or traffic patterns and blocking the source from which they come and more. When planning protection for networks and communication systems, you need to plan correctly what you are buying and how you operate what you are buying, and especially avoid white elephants that exist in large quantities in information security, because from time-to-time salespeople from one company or another will visit you and enthusiastically introduce you to a new product that in a short examination you will find that you have already purchased the same thing at least once.
What we can help you with is proper planning, and just as important in proper cost planning, with emphasis on risks versus protections versus the cost of protections required. To put it simple, to evaluate the risks, the probability that they will happen, what are the risks wen they happen and what is the cost to prevent them.
