One of the Leading Concerns of Today's Businesses

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Security continues to be one of the leading concerns of businesses today. With increasing interconnection of networks, extending work outside of the traditional office, and electronic commerce with customers the vectors for attacks are growing. A carefully crafted security policy is the first step to securing your enterprise. Upon review of your current business practices we have several recommendations to help increase your security posture.
Social Engineering
Social engineering is the practice of utilizing known information to misrepresent oneself for the purpose of broaching a company’s security. The popularity of social engineering has a method of hacking is exploding. In the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report it was found that 29% of all breaches utilized social engineering tactics, 4 times more than in 2012 (2013, p. 6). This attack works upon the natural instinct of people to attempt to be helpful and fill in the blanks. The best protection from social engineering is a set of careful policies to control behavior around the unknown.
The first line of defense should be a careful set of document handling procedures. Access to all customer records, billing information, and proprietary information should be controlled through an established records policy. Once records are no longer needed they should be destroyed via shredding and burning. This ensures your proprietary information stays out of the hands of hackers who could use them to establish a social engineering attack.
Internal security policies around employee identification need to be established and followed to the letter. For facility access security badges with photographs are an easy way to ensure those entering your facility have been author...

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...curity posture.
Conclusion
Securing the infrastructure and data that your business runs on is a serious matter. The process goes beyond simply specifying hard to remember passwords. This high-level security policy overview should aid in shedding some light on areas of concern and what can be done about them. We will be happy to participate in further study and analysis with the goal of crafting a comprehensive security strategy for your company,

Works Cited

IEEE 802.1X Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (RADIUS) Usage Guidelines. Retrieved March 13, 2014 from: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3580
United States Computer Emergency Response Team, (2014). Vulnerability summary for the week of march 3, 2014 (SB14-069). Retrieved from website: http://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/bulletins/SB14-069
Verizon (2013). Data Breach Investigations Report. Ashburn, VA: Author.

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