18 Principles of Cyber Security Everyone must Follow

The rise in cyber crimes has made it mandatory for us to upgrade the security of our system to the next level. This has built up pressure on security engineers to never miss out on any vulnerability and keep the security tight round the clock.

Let us look at the key principles of Cyber Security.

Principles of Cyber Security

The principles of cybersecurity guide the organization to achieve the highest level of protection by following certain best practices.

The principles of cybersecurity are the steps taken by a business or an individual to surpass any attack in cyberspace. They help us to govern and protect the data by detecting and responding to network vulnerabilities.

The following are the crucial principles of cybersecurity:

• Framing a Risk Management Regime
• Economy of Mechanism
• Secure all configurations
• Fail-safe defaults
• Network security
• Managing user privileges
• Open design
• Monitoring
• Complete mediation
• Home and mobile networking
• Work factor
• Incident management
• Prevention of malware
• Acceptance of security breaches

Let’s look at each one of them in detail.

1. Framing a Risk Management Regime

A risk management regime is a system of rules and policies followed during the occurrence of a risk. Board of members with expertise in this area lay down policies for the regime.

Exploring the various sources of risks and prioritizing them based on ranks help in defining the rules. All employees, contractors, and suppliers involved in the business must be made aware of the final structure of risk management. It helps in minimizing risk exposure and identifies growth opportunities.

2. Economy of Mechanism

This Principle aims to make the security mechanisms as basic as possible by simplifying the design and implementation of the same. The idea behind this principle is that the smaller the design, the fewer are the occurrences of the error. This in turn reduces the load in the testing phase.

The interfaces between the modules are prone to more vulnerabilities. This is because it handles many assumptions about the data flowing in as input and the data flowing out as output. A simpler security framework eliminates confusion and provides better clarity to the development team.

3. Secure all Configurations

Security configuration is the set of measures that are employed during the construction and installation of computers in the network. It helps in reducing unwanted security vulnerabilities in the system. It also includes the removal of unwanted functionalities to eliminate the possibility of a security breach.

Managing access permission, disabling auto-run features, and monitoring user authorizations help in achieving secure configuration of a system.

4. Fail-safe Defaults

The idea behind fail-safe defaults is that, when a system fails, it should still be able to maintain a secure state. This is typically done by denying access to any object outside the scope during downtime.

This protocol drives the system to undo any changes on failure and restore to a secure state. This way attackers are not able to gain access to the privileged objects that are normally vulnerable during a failure.

Hence the integrity and confidentiality of the system are still in good shape even though the availability of the system has been compromised.

5. Network Security

Network security serves as a foundation to establish policies and architectures for maintaining a secure network. It reduces the risk of becoming a victim in cyberspace.

It nails down a framework through which the data flowing into the system and out from the system should pass through. This helps us cut down any threats entering via the network before reaching the system and vice versa.

Firewalls help to filter any virus that is trying to enter into the system perimeter. Similarly, filters prevent malware from sending out infected data to other nodes in the network.

6. Managing User Privileges

Managing user privileges is very essential to any business. Provide minimal access privileges to the users to complete their tasks. This prevents misuse of privileges and locks all the loose ends that act as an entry point for unauthorized third parties.

Avoid sharing the company’s passcode which contains sensitive data to everyone. Verifying users’ identities before granting access is important.

When a user requests for higher-level access privilege, grant permission to the user only if he has a task at that level. The rights can be withdrawn when the task is complete.

7. Open Design

It states that the security of a mechanism should not completely rely on the secrecy of its design or implementation. If a mechanism completely relies on secrecy to protect data, it becomes completely vulnerable and wide open to attack when the secrecy breaks.

Open security protects the system components with methods whose designs are publicly available. This strengthens the secrecy of the key by implementing cryptographic methods for encryption.

Maintain different levels of security to ensure secrecy of key and allow only authorized users to see the key.

8. Monitoring

Monitoring gives complete visibility over the security activities happening across the organization. It comes as a savior to rescue our system when intrusion detection and prevention facilities fail to handle a security breach.

An organization achieves this by framing a monitoring strategy with backing up policies. It involves monitoring individual systems, user activities, decluttering, and finally reviewing and recording the lessons learned.

9. Complete Mediation

This principle makes sure that every user who gets object access must be an authorized user. It sets up a fool-proof protection scheme that checks the compliance behind requests to every object.

The system must improve performance by remembering the results of previous authorization checks and update the permissions systematically. It also involves operations like initialization, recovery, shutdown, and maintenance.

Timed sessions for online transactions are a great example of complete mediation.

10. Home and Mobile Networking

Employees and customers use remote networking while they are at home or while using mobile.

Since users disconnect from the company’s local network, exposure to network threats is a concern. This makes it necessary to establish risk-based policies for the company to support home and mobile networking.

These policies prevent the loss of information which is critical to the organization.

11. Work Factor

The expense of bypassing a security mechanism weighed up with the resources of the attacker is what we call the work factor. The work factor is the cost of circumventing. In other words, it is the complexity of breaking the cipher in cryptographic encryption.

For example, an attacker must try 244 = 331776 possibilities to crack a 4 letter cipher. But when the attacker makes use of a tool that feeds 1 million keys per second, breaking the system isn’t that difficult.

12. Incident Management

The security information and event management (SIEM) software brings up many security-associated incidents to you.

The organization must frame incident management policies. This guarantees the protection of the system and data during security compromising incidents. Hence a company drafts an incident management monitoring plan.

Response resources must be ready in place to act during high-risk events. Preparing reliable backup helps in the recovery of lost resources.

13. Prevention of Malware

Malware is a very commonly concerned issue faced by all organizations. Since malware comes in different forms a common unified approach cannot handle the situation. Each type must have a dedicated expert solution.

Use spam email thread protection software to protect emails from phishing attacks. Use firewalls and intrusion prevention systems to prevent malware attacks in the network. use antivirus software to detect any malware sitting in the OS.

14. Acceptance of Security Breaches

Cyber attackers keep finding new ways to break the security parameters. Hence breaches and compromisations of system and data will occur no matter how sophisticated the security framework is.

Learning from the past experiences and educating the users with awareness training will help in this direction.

15. Least Common Mechanism

The principle of least common mechanism states that do not share the mechanism used to access resources in systems with multiple users.

Sharing resources makes use of a communication medium where transmission of information occurs. Hence minimize the amount of data shared and restrict it to the intended limit.

16. Compromise Recording

The Compromise Recording principle suggests that prefer a mechanism that records a compromise over a mechanism that prevents loss. This is because sometimes recording the details of intrusion are more important than preventing it. This approach helps the company to adopt a more sophisticated initiative to prevent loss in the future.

Maintaining logs of all file access activities is a great example of compromise recording.

17. User Education and Awareness

Organization’s employees and clients hold a huge responsibility in safeguarding and securing the organization’s resources.

Lack of knowledge about the company’s policies and risk management regime can hold the company’s data at stake. Hence awareness training must be made mandatory for all members of the business.

This helps the people to gain knowledge about policies and best practices that prevent security breaches to a great extent. To face any sophisticated breaches at any point in time security professionals must be extensively trained.

18. Removable Media Controls

Removable media are plugin portable storages. These can unknowingly spread malware across devices.

Viruses can be effortlessly installed on USB, CD’s, or any other removable storage and infect the entire network. This demands the necessity of removable media policies for every organization that aims in minimising the usage of the same.

The organization must apply for passcode protection and encrypt all data present in the removable device.

Conclusion

Cybersecurity principles drive the drafting of business solutions to attain the highest level of security for the organization. Understanding what happens at the endpoints and focusing on the common elements of malicious activity is crucial. This can help us gain insights into the pattern and methods of attack.

No security can guarantee 100% protection. Security improvement must be progressive compared to the previous ones.