Data is the most important resource that any business owns. It’s literally possible to replace any part of a business except the data. When the data is modified, corrupted, stolen, or deleted, a business can suffer serious loss. In fact, a business that has enough go wrong with its data can simply cease to exist. The focus of security, therefore, is not hackers, applications, networks, or any…
Security is arguably one of the most critical architectural components of any web-based application written in the 21st century. In an era where malware, criminals, and rogue employees are always present and actively testing software for exploits, smart and comprehensive use of security is a key element to any project for which you'll be responsible. This book is written to follow a pattern o…
This chapter introduces the principles of network security monitoring (NSM), which is the collection, analysis, and escalation of indications and warnings to detect and respond to intrusions. NSM is a way to find intruders on your network and do something about them before they damage your enterprise.
Many of us test web applications on either a daily or regular basis. We may be following a script of interactions (“click here, type XYZ, click Submit, check for OK message…”) or we might be writing frameworks that invoke batteries of automated tests against our web applications. Most of us are somewhere in between. Regardless of how we test, we need to get security testing into what we…
For many years Microsoft has maintained two sets of operating systems that both used the Windows name. From Windows 95 and 98 to Windows Me, an inexpensive operating system that could be used for both home and business applications was produced. For the server and workstation market, Microsoft produced Windows NT and Windows 2000. But maintaining two different operating system kernels for these…
Wireless networks and security might be considered an oxymoron. Indeed it is hard to believe in security when it is so easy to access communication media such as wireless radio media. However, the research community in industry and academia has for many years extended wired security mechanisms or developed new security mechanisms and security protocols to sustain this marriage between wireless/…
Wireshark is perhaps the world's most popular network packet analyzer used to troubleshoot and analyze network and application protocols across wide variety of technologies. Wireshark is free, open source, and available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and several Unix-like platforms, and it is continuously being improved and expanded by its original developer, Gerald Combs, and over 500 code cont…
The first edition of this book appeared eight years ago. Since then the banking industry experienced a lot of change and challenges. The most recent financial crisis which started around May 2007 and lasted in its core period until early 2009 gave rise to a lot of scepticism about whether credit risk models are appropriate to capture the true nature of risks inherent in credit portfolios in gen…
It's Friday night, and you are at a party outside the city with old friends. After a few beers it looks like this is going to be a great party, when suddenly your phone rings. A customer can't access some critical server that absolutely has to be available as soon as possible. You try to ssh in the server, only to discover that customer is right—it can't be accessed. As driving after those fe…
Zabbix was born as a distributed network monitoring tool with a central web interface where you can manage almost everything. Nowadays, with Zabbix 2.4, the number of possible architectures has been reduced to a single server setup and a Zabbix-proxies distributed setup.
Whether it's internal or public-facing technology, businesses of all sizes depend on the availability of their IT assets, which may include servers, routers, networks, switches, and websites. If you're picking up this book, then you already know the value of monitoring and more than likely have an installation of Zenoss Core running. Zenoss Core is an open source network and system monitoring …
If you have ever arrived at work to answer voice mails and emails about a down web server, print server, or mail server, then you must be familiar with the customer-driven monitoring solution. It's cheap to implement but unreliable, and sometimes the monitor gets an attitude and for good reason. Our customers should not bear the responsibility of monitoring our networks for problems. Unfortun…