The past year has been a hair-raising series of IT security breakdowns and headlining events reaching as high as RSA itself falling victim to a phishing attack.   But as the year set on 2011, the hacker group Anonymous remained busy, providing a sobering reminder that IT Security can never rest.

It turned out that attackers sent two different targeted phishing e-mails to four workers at its parent company, EMC.   The e-mails contained a malicious attachment that was identified in the subject line as “2011 Recruitment plan.xls” which was the point of attack.

Back to Basics:

Prevent:

Using administrative controls such as security awareness training, technical controls such as firewalls, and anti-virus and IPS, to stop attacks from penetrating the network.   Most industry and government experts agree that security configuration management is probably the best way to ensure the best security configuration allowable, along with automated patch management and updating anti-virus software.

Detect:

Employing a blend of technical controls such as anti-virus, IPS, intrusion detection systems (IDS), system monitoring, file integrity monitoring, change control, log management and incident alerting   can help to track how and when system intrusions are being attempted.

Correct:

Applying operating system upgrades, backup data restore and vulnerability mitigation and other controls to make sure systems are configured correctly and can prevent the irretrievable loss of data.