Security Monitoring activity and Attack Detection
Security monitoring practices are extremely important issues to an organization’s infrastructure. Within the past five years the amount of cases of malicious security threats against businesses has been on the rise. These incidents have become very problematic for small and mid-size company’s causing great sums of time and money to be spent fighting against these security issue. Threat from outside an organization, like a virus, may not always be the biggest problems. Threats that emanate from inside, in many instances, leave a company at greater risk for breaches of security.
Regulatory restrictions make it mandatory for many larger businesses to have in place security monitoring practices that secures ones information system, protect the security network, and tracks, records, and monitors everyone who has access to those resources. Small and midsize companies, which are not under private or governmental regulatory policies and requirements, would be wise to understand the probability that without security monitoring practices in place the risk of a debilitating attack becomes a question of when not if. When an organizations infrastructure is attacked there are unforeseen consequences that could disrupt operations collapsing productivity, causing hourly and monetary loss and in many cases could cost the company its reputation (Hummel, 2009).
Good security monitoring activities should include a monitoring solution, using as much technological security practices as possible as well as a select well informed IT security team to oversee hardware, software, any human element involved in security monitoring activities and attack detection and prevention. The practice of using security logs to monitor the activity of a company’s information and security systems is another good tool employed in a security monitoring solution. Although the monitoring of security logs could be a challenge for a small or midsize business, it remains a good idea to spend the resources to acquire good security log management software to properly manage the collecting, processing, and deciphering of the log information. Security logs are created in many hardware and software environments including
1. Firewalls
2. Operating systems
3. Workstations
4. Switches
5. Routers
6. Applications
7.