Practical Vulnerability Management shows you how to weed out system security weaknesses and squash cyber threats in their tracks. Bugs: they're everywhere. Software, firmware, hardware -- they all have them. Bugs even live in the cloud. And when one of these bugs is leveraged to wreak havoc or steal sensitive information, a company's prized technology assets suddenly become serious liabilities. Fortunately, exploitable security weaknesses are entirely preventable; you just have to find them before the bad guys do. Practical Vulnerability Management will help you achieve this goal on a budget, with a proactive process for detecting bugs and squashing the threat they pose. The book starts by introducing the practice of vulnerability management, its tools and components, and detailing the ways it improves an enterprise's overall security posture. Then it's time to get your hands dirty! As the content shifts from conceptual to practical, you're guided through creating a vulnerability-management system from the ground up, using open-source software. Along the way, you'll learn how to: • Generate accurate and usable vulnerability intelligence • Scan your networked systems to identify and assess bugs and vulnerabilities • Prioritize and respond to various security risks • Automate scans, data analysis, reporting, and other repetitive tasks • Customize the provided scripts to adapt them to your own needs Playing whack-a-bug won't cut it against today's advanced adversaries. Use this book to set up, maintain, and enhance an effective vulnerability management system, and ensure your organization is always a step ahead of hacks and attacks.

Key Features Gain a clear understanding of the attack methods, and patterns to recognize abnormal behavior within your organization with Blue Team tactics Learn to unique techniques to gather exploitation intelligence, identify risk and demonstrate impact with Red Team and Blue Team strategies A practical guide that will give you hands-on experience to mitigate risks and prevent attackers from infiltrating your system Book DescriptionThe book will start talking about the security posture before moving to Red Team tactics, where you will learn the basic syntax for the Windows and Linux tools that are commonly used to perform the necessary operations. You will also gain hands-on experience of using new Red Team techniques with powerful tools such as python and PowerShell, which will enable you to discover vulnerabilities in your system and how to exploit them. Moving on, you will learn how a system is usually compromised by adversaries, and how they hack user's identity, and the various tools used by the Red Team to find vulnerabilities in a system. In the next section, you will learn about the defense strategies followed by the Blue Team to enhance the overall security of a system. You will also learn about an in-depth strategy to ensure that there are security controls in each network layer, and how you can carry out the recovery process of a compromised system. Finally, you will learn how to create a vulnerability management strategy and the different techniques for manual log analysis.What you will learn Learn the importance of having a solid foundation for your security posture Understand the attack strategy using cyber security kill chain Learn how to enhance your defense strategy by improving your security policies, hardening your network, implementing active sensors, and leveraging threat intelligence Learn how to perform an incident investigation Get an in-depth understanding of the recovery process Understand continuous security monitoring and how to implement a vulnerability management strategy Learn how to perform log analysis to identify suspicious activities Who this book is for This book aims at IT professional who want to venture the IT security domain. IT pentester, Security consultants, and ethical hackers will also find this course useful. Prior knowledge of penetration testing would be beneficial.

Cyber Strategy: Risk-Driven Security and Resiliency provides a process and roadmap for any company to develop its unified Cybersecurity and Cyber Resiliency strategies. It demonstrates a methodology for companies to combine their disassociated efforts into one corporate plan with buy-in from senior management that will efficiently utilize resources, target high risk threats, and evaluate risk assessment methodologies and the efficacy of resultant risk mitigations. The book discusses all the steps required from conception of the plan from preplanning (mission/vision, principles, strategic objectives, new initiatives derivation), project management directives, cyber threat and vulnerability analysis, cyber risk and controls assessment to reporting and measurement techniques for plan success and overall strategic plan performance. In addition, a methodology is presented to aid in new initiative selection for the following year by identifying all relevant inputs. Tools utilized include: Key Risk Indicators (KRI) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cyber Security Framework (CSF) Target State Maturity interval mapping per initiative Comparisons of current and target state business goals and critical success factors A quantitative NIST-based risk assessment of initiative technology components Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) diagrams for Cyber Steering Committee tasks and Governance Boards’ approval processes Swimlanes, timelines, data flow diagrams (inputs, resources, outputs), progress report templates, and Gantt charts for project management The last chapter provides downloadable checklists, tables, data flow diagrams, figures, and assessment tools to help develop your company’s cybersecurity and cyber resiliency strategic plan.

Build an effective vulnerability management strategy to protect your organization’s assets, applications, and data. Today’s network environments are dynamic, requiring multiple defenses to mitigate vulnerabilities and stop data breaches. In the modern enterprise, everything connected to the network is a target. Attack surfaces are rapidly expanding to include not only traditional servers and desktops, but also routers, printers, cameras, and other IOT devices. It doesn’t matter whether an organization uses LAN, WAN, wireless, or even a modern PAN—savvy criminals have more potential entry points than ever before. To stay ahead of these threats, IT and security leaders must be aware of exposures and understand their potential impact. Asset Attack Vectors will help you build a vulnerability management program designed to work in the modern threat environment. Drawing on years of combined experience, the authors detail the latest techniques for threat analysis, risk measurement, and regulatory reporting. They also outline practical service level agreements (SLAs) for vulnerability management and patch management. Vulnerability management needs to be more than a compliance check box; it should be the foundation of your organization’s cybersecurity strategy. Read Asset Attack Vectors to get ahead of threats and protect your organization with an effective asset protection strategy. What You’ll Learn Create comprehensive assessment and risk identification policies and procedures Implement a complete vulnerability management workflow in nine easy steps Understand the implications of active, dormant, and carrier vulnerability states Develop, deploy, and maintain custom and commercial vulnerability management programs Discover the best strategies for vulnerability remediation, mitigation, and removal Automate credentialed scans that leverage least-privilege access principles Read real-world case studies that share successful strategies and reveal potential pitfalls Who This Book Is For New and intermediate security management professionals, auditors, and information technology staff looking to build an effective vulnerability management program and defend against asset based cyberattacks

See how privileges, insecure passwords, administrative rights, and remote access can be combined as an attack vector to breach any organization. Cyber attacks continue to increase in volume and sophistication. It is not a matter of if, but when, your organization will be breached. Threat actors target the path of least resistance: users and their privileges. In decades past, an entire enterprise might be sufficiently managed through just a handful of credentials. Today’s environmental complexity has seen an explosion of privileged credentials for many different account types such as domain and local administrators, operating systems (Windows, Unix, Linux, macOS, etc.), directory services, databases, applications, cloud instances, networking hardware, Internet of Things (IoT), social media, and so many more. When unmanaged, these privileged credentials pose a significant threat from external hackers and insider threats. We are experiencing an expanding universe of privileged accounts almost everywhere. There is no one solution or strategy to provide the protection you need against all vectors and stages of an attack. And while some new and innovative products will help protect against or detect against a privilege attack, they are not guaranteed to stop 100% of malicious activity. The volume and frequency of privilege-based attacks continues to increase and test the limits of existing security controls and solution implementations. Privileged Attack Vectors details the risks associated with poor privilege management, the techniques that threat actors leverage, and the defensive measures that organizations should adopt to protect against an incident, protect against lateral movement, and improve the ability to detect malicious activity due to the inappropriate usage of privileged credentials. This revised and expanded second edition covers new attack vectors, has updated definitions for privileged access management (PAM), new strategies for defense, tested empirical steps for a successful implementation, and includes new disciplines for least privilege endpoint management and privileged remote access. What You Will Learn Know how identities, accounts, credentials, passwords, and exploits can be leveraged to escalate privileges during an attack Implement defensive and monitoring strategies to mitigate privilege threats and risk Understand a 10-step universal privilege management implementation plan to guide you through a successful privilege access management journeyDevelop a comprehensive model for documenting risk, compliance, and reporting based on privilege session activity Who This Book Is For Security management professionals, new security professionals, and auditors looking to understand and solve privilege access management problems

BUILD YOUR CYBERSECURITY PROGRAM WITH THIS COMPLETELY UPDATED GUIDE Security practitioners now have a comprehensive blueprint to build their cybersecurity programs. Building an Effective Cybersecurity Program (2nd Edition) instructs security architects, security managers, and security engineers how to properly construct effective cybersecurity programs using contemporary architectures, frameworks, and models. This comprehensive book is the result of the author’s professional experience and involvement in designing and deploying hundreds of cybersecurity programs. The extensive content includes: Recommended design approaches, Program structure, Cybersecurity technologies, Governance Policies, Vulnerability, Threat and intelligence capabilities, Risk management, Defense-in-depth, DevSecOps, Service management, ...and much more! The book is presented as a practical roadmap detailing each step required for you to build your effective cybersecurity program. It also provides many design templates to assist in program builds and all chapters include self-study questions to gauge your progress. With this new 2nd edition of this handbook, you can move forward confidently, trusting that Schreider is recommending the best components of a cybersecurity program for you. In addition, the book provides hundreds of citations and references allow you to dig deeper as you explore specific topics relevant to your organization or your studies. Whether you are a new manager or current manager involved in your organization’s cybersecurity program, this book will answer many questions you have on what is involved in building a program. You will be able to get up to speed quickly on program development practices and have a roadmap to follow in building or improving your organization’s cybersecurity program. If you are new to cybersecurity in the short period of time it will take you to read this book, you can be the smartest person in the room grasping the complexities of your organization’s cybersecurity program. If you are a manager already involved in your organization’s cybersecurity program, you have much to gain from reading this book. This book will become your go to field manual guiding or affirming your program decisions.

Despite the increase of high-profile hacks, record-breaking data leaks, and ransomware attacks, many organizations don’t have the budget to establish or outsource an information security (InfoSec) program, forcing them to learn on the job. For companies obliged to improvise, this pragmatic guide provides a security-101 handbook with steps, tools, processes, and ideas to help you drive maximum-security improvement at little or no cost. Each chapter in this book provides step-by-step instructions for dealing with a specific issue, including breaches and disasters, compliance, network infrastructure and password management, vulnerability scanning, and penetration testing, among others. Network engineers, system administrators, and security professionals will learn tools and techniques to help improve security in sensible, manageable chunks. Learn fundamentals of starting or redesigning an InfoSec program Create a base set of policies, standards, and procedures Plan and design incident response, disaster recovery, compliance, and physical security Bolster Microsoft and Unix systems, network infrastructure, and password management Use segmentation practices and designs to compartmentalize your network Explore automated process and tools for vulnerability management Securely develop code to reduce exploitable errors Understand basic penetration testing concepts through purple teaming Delve into IDS, IPS, SOC, logging, and monitoring