Security Foundations
Ric Messier · 2019
This chapter provides some essential concepts of information security. The CIA triad is a set of three attributes, or properties. The three elements are confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Each of these properties needs to be taken into consideration when developing security plans. Each of them, to varying degrees of importance, will be essential in planning defenses. Not every defense will incorporate each of the three properties to the same extent. Some defenses impact only one property, for instance. From an attack perspective, a tester or adversary would be looking to compromise one of these elements within an organization. Preparing for attacks is essential in businesses today. Certainly there are incident response plans, policies, and teams. However, from a technology standpoint, logging and auditing can be very helpful when it comes time to respond. Logging may be system logging or application logging, where there is a trail of actions that have been determined by the programmer. When it comes to auditing, Windows auditing capabilities include success or failure logs for access to files, users, or other system objects. On the Linux side, audit rules can be written to watch files and directories as well as system calls.