Servers, laptops and desktops in any organization need to be secure since a breach in security can result in confidential data leaking out, loss of confidence by clients, destruction or alteration of valuable or inability to access computing resources that can result in lost productivity. The cost of security breaches can also be very high indeed. Protection against malware and malicious hackers is in fact one of the significant areas that organizations devote resources especially in corporate IT network security. What defenses are employed to minimize these threats in a typical organization?
One of these is the use of a firewall that separates a network from the internet. Such a firewall can either be hardware, software or an implementation of both. Another protection mechanism is the use of an intrusion prevention and detection system also called IPS/IDS that performs port scans to detect any hacker activities and take steps to prevent successful penetration to the network. Other security measures include the use of malware scanners and the use of passwords to prevent unauthorized access to the network. However, a deceptively simple question remains. How effective are these IT network security measures? This is a vital question since it determines whether holes in the firewall will leave a network vulnerable, if the wrong configuration of the IPS/IDS will provide effective protection and if insufficiently strong passwords will provide the required protection. In addition to the above possibilities there is also the risk of an unauthorized and insecure access points that have been set up.
IT network security can be enhanced by use of penetration testing. This effectively tries to test how secure your IT infrastructure is. The test may include information gathering, port scanning to establish connected systems, reconnaissance which involves contacting an organizations servers and trying to get information from them, network sniffing to get passwords and usernames in transit and password attacks where one tries to decrypt passwords to get access to the network. Usually, these tests are performed by ethical hackers who attempt to break into a network and discover information. Penetration testing software can also be used to search for vulnerabilities automatically. The software can be undertaken on a weekly or monthly basis or wherever you make significant infrastructure changes. If you able to successfully compromise your organizations security, then likely hackers will be successful as well. Use a variety of port scanning and packet sniffing tools to determine the level of your IT network security and take measures to secure any vulnerable ports.
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