Inside the Security Mind: Making the Tough Decisions

Internal Defenses

It is close to impossible to read any security publication without seeing a phrase like, “The majority of successful hackers come from the insides of networks, not the Internet,” and this book is no exception to this standard. Protecting internal networks is a very different task than that of protecting the perimeter. With our perimeter, we can define specific chokepoints and consolidate security measures; on an internal network, we are dealing with everything as a whole. There is no firewall that we can filter everyone through, and there is no IDS that will adequately monitor the average internal infrastructure. On top of it all, we have to grant much higher levels of access to internal systems and users than to external customers ...