June 29, 2005 - (HOSTSEARCH.COM) - Web hosting providers and web masters alike may be interested in the ideas behind Erik Pace Birkholz’s, president and founder of Special Ops Security, "Fight Network Negligence" presentation at Cal State University Pomona.
Birkholz will discuss the need for organizations to migrate from a traditional network or perimeter-centric security model to a more secure asset-centric model in which risk can be quantified and managed according to asset criticality. "Much of the nastiness is on the inside with worms and employee theft attacking internally. A perimeter defense creates a hard outer shell, but the interior is still soft," said Birkholz. "An asset-centric model protects the right assets, from the right threats, with the right measures. Assets of greater criticality and value to an organization are held to higher security standards and protected by additional layers of defense. If possible, they should be compartmentalized into their own networks and segments."
With bot-nets and Trojans being increasingly used by organized crime it only makes sense for hosting providers to place extra protection on their most valuable assets.
Birkholz describes the means a company can take to move towards an asset-centric model on the Special Ops site, “There are several steps. First you compartmentalize assets into security zones based on their criticality. Then you assess exposures and vulnerabilities in each zone. You plan and execute remediation and implement appropriate mitigating controls. Then you audit the effectiveness of those controls. You monitor all points of ingress and egress for critical security zones and monitor all operating system and application logs of assets in critical security zones.”
