Security Intelligence: A Practitioner's Guide to Solving Enterprise Security Challenges

Preface

The digitization of a prodigious amount of information is intensifying, from health care records and educational backgrounds, to employment history, credit reports, and financial statements. Words like eBilling, eStatements, and paperless transactions have become part of our everyday language. The ever-increasing ability to retrieve this digital information online, combined with both the unremitting compilation of such information to extrapolate personal traits and behavior and the explosion of convenient venues for accessing the Internet, should encourage questions in curious minds: “Just how vulnerable are we to threats against personal privacy?” and “Who is at liberty to scrutinize the vast amounts of private data?”

In recent years, the rapid growth of high-bandwidth network infrastructures accompanied by a dramatic reduction in storage costs serve as the catalysts in the construction and commercialization of various cloud-based services, which are offered to both institutions and individuals. These cloud-based services range from personal online backup storage, content-sharing, and collaboration tools to customer relations management (CRM). These services are easily attainable with affordable prices that will only invigorate adoption and proliferation. Naturally, for security-conscious minds, questions arise as to how penetrable these services are by nefarious entities and, when compromised, how limited in scope the resulting damages will be from a specific breach ...