Simplicity and Awareness – Keys to Network Security

Few people believe that maintaining a sound network security posture is easy. Those who do are deluding themselves, unless they practice two

fundamental tenets of security: simplicity and awareness. Simplicity facilitates abstraction, which is the basis of all computing. Abstraction is the ability to imagine and evaluate processes and data with no equivalent in the physical world. Awareness is an augmentation to abstraction, giving a better idea of exactly what processes and communications must be manipulated mentally. For example, a company must be aware of users from Hungary mounting drives remotely on its file server. This may violate its security policy. Unfortunately, the modern networking environment is destroying both simplicity and awareness. The purpose of this article is to explain how security professionals can deal with this hostile situation.

The author wants to note the following: “The article features a small amount of creative editing by the World Markets Research Centre (WMRC) staff. I certainly didn’t intend for “UNIX” to be defined as a “Uniplexed Information and Computer System!”

Download the paper in PDF format here.