All firms, small and big ones should conduct a security audit on their data structures and their website. Every owner or manager of a website must lead at regular intervals a security audit to determine if everything is secure.
Because of the frequent changes that are made in the technology and softwares, security auditing is essential as a prevention tool but also for planning future equipment needs, programming and logistical support.
How to conduct a security audit?
Before driving a security audit, you must do some planning (pre-audit) and organizing this recurring task. An infrastructure plan should be done. If you have a small system, you can always write down the brand, model, drive capacity and memory, software versions, proof of purchase and warranty.
You should then make a short summary of what constitutes the infrastructure. Mentioning how many computers are in the network, internet access point, routers, switches, wiring, where are these facilities and who is the internet provider with the account number and the annual cost of the solution.
Then you determine if your security audit is done globally or if it is done in portions all year long. You might determine to check that online transactions meet the standards every 6 months, but keep an audit of physical security every 3 months. In addition, you may establish a software audit annually.
A possible division of audits should respect your budget, be well targeted in dates in order to have all relevant human resources available during the audit.
It is useful to clearly define the objectives of the audit of each departments according to their environment by clearly stating the degree of sensitivity of the data passing through. All policies and procedures or guidelines should be classified in handwritten files made available to all and clearly identified.
Remember that security auditing is used to enforce security, it is a development tool for systems and data. Do not search for things not done as demanded rather to improve the situation by taking the current pulse of the situation.
The Checklist
Depending on the type of organization in which you operate, the elements constituting the safety audit will increase. Even in small businesses you should have these basic elements:
– Check the protection of passwords;
– Check open and accessible network ports;
– Whether it is possible to do SQL Injection;
– Determine whether the backups and supports are adequate in number and quality;
– Check that the updates are done on a regular basis and all softwares are up to date;
– Check vulnerabilities of servers : Their location, their age, the risk of damage etc.
In a wider audit plan, there are hundreds of factors that are to be assessed by high risk, medium or low risk. It is necessary to determine a schedule for each of these items and vote a budget to solve them instead of seeing the list grow in number.
The problems often come at the worst time. The failure to conduct security audit not only exposes you to hackers and data loss but also the contingencies and misfortunes.
If you are vulnerable at all points of view, you will certainly not fulfill your short or medium term mission.
Internet Cloud Canada conducts comprehensive security audits for all types of organizations. Our solution allows you to develop your business and ensure the quality of data processing!
Open Solutions for audit check
Every origanizations have differents goals, budget and views of security audits. There’s open solutions available. They do not give the full state of your business vulnerabilities, but it’s better than nothing at all!
For LINUX, the following testing and auditing tools can inform you about some flaws in your systems.
You can also use the free or near-free online scan solutions to identify some vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
Whatever the nature of your organization or its size or complexity, you have to drive minimally a security audit annually and ensure to include as much informations possible to make good decisions that will shape your future.
If you need some advices or find that open solutions do not meet your needs or are too complex, our technicians will be happy to conduct your security audits for you.
We include in our audits: DOM-Based Cross-site Scripting, Reflected Cross-site Scripting, verifying all credentials and passwords, tests of the security certificates (https), PCI standards for online merchants, correct encoding of Data in HTML, checking the physical safety of the equipment and its environment. The audit we drive will be aligned with your objectives and your budget!
