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The first step in any sort of secure architecture design
is going to be figuring out exactly what we're
trying to protect, how we need to go about protecting it,
and all of the processes to accomplish our goals there.
So let's start talking about what secure architecture-- what
that phrase means and how we can use a secure architecture
in cybersecurity.
So first of all, secure architecture
is basically a process, or a series of processes,
for designing and building and configuring your infrastructure
with security in mind.
All of this starts with having a proper design
for your environment but while, again,
keeping security in mind.
Security needs to be one of the forefront
pieces of these conversations when
you're working on designing this whole infrastructure
and building out in secure architecture.
A lot of this is going to be based around the assets you
have in place.
In order to know what you have, what
servers need to be protected, you
need to know what you have in your environment.
This is where your asset management comes in
and your documentation comes in.
Documentation and asset management
are huge parts of a proper secure architecture.
Now, part of building the architecture
and building this infrastructure-- it's
going to consist of deploying hardened servers, which
are servers that have additional security controls in place
or locked down as much as they can to try and minimize
that attack surface, in addition to workstations,
any other endpoints.
It's all designed with deploying these and setting these systems
up with security in mind.
In addition to the servers in the workstations and endpoints,
you need to design a secure network infrastructure.
You need to figure out what your network is going to look like,
how security is going to influence that as well,
and then how you're going to implement it down the line
as well, especially with things what the layout is going
to look like, how authentication is going to work
on the network, what kind of network segmentation
you're going to have, all kinds of things like that.
Now, secure architecture, the design of it--
it's good to have your infrastructure in mind,
but you also need proper policies, procedures,
and standards to back up this secure architecture.
If there is no written policies that
are enforced by the organization,
then the plans for secure architecture
don't necessarily mean a whole lot.
And with that, you want to have the procedures in place
for what exactly needs to be done.
How is this infrastructure being set up?
What exactly needs to be done?
And then, when you have everything
at its base configuration, that's
when you deploy your baselines.
And you set up your baselines so that you
can compare what a later stage of your infrastructure
looks like based on what it should have been set up
or initially was set up as, and you
use the baselines to do that.
So now, starting out your design with security in mind,
starting with a secure design will
help eliminate a lot of the future issues
you may come across.
Security honestly really needs to be in the design
and in the considerations and in the conversations
and everything from the beginning of the design
of your infrastructure and your entire network,
and throughout the entire lifecycle of it
as well, not just in the design, but the implementation,
and the upkeep, and the maintenance,
and the day-to-day activities, and everything else.
Keeping security at the beginning, or keeping security,
really, throughout the whole process,
let's lets you have a lot stronger controls
and leads to better use and adaptation of those controls
as well.
When security is brought in from the very beginning
and the security concerns are a part of the conversations
from the beginning, everyone is more likely to just accept
security as a part of it.
And I don't mean security as the security team.
I mean security as the concept of cyber security.
And again, having the policies to support this
is really what backs this up and really
helps you have the controls, the organizational controls to be
able to properly implement your security controls.
And then having security from the very beginning--
this also gets you the additional buy-in
from your executive leadership team.
So you have support from the top-down
through just them being involved in the conversations
and knowing what's going on, but also
supporting the policies, and the procedures,
and the standards, and everything else,
having that executive leader buy-in is
critical for any successful security program.
And if you bring in security as an afterthought,
you're going to have more potential issues.
You're going to have more incidents.
You're going to have data breaches.
If the architecture in the infrastructure
is not designed from the beginning with security
in mind, not necessarily as secure as it possibly can be,
but with security in mind, you are significantly
increasing the risks to your organization
from a cybersecurity perspective.
So how do we figure out what our secure architecture
needs to look like?
How do we figure out what to do here?
We go through a process called threat modeling.
And I have a whole other video on threat modeling
as part of this course.
But this is basically a process, or series
of processes in this case, that are designed
to help you figure out what possible impacts
to your infrastructure there might be.
This is very similar to risk assessments and risk analysis.
But threat modeling is a very specific type
of assessment, if you will, to really figure out
what the possible impacts will be to your infrastructure.
And it's geared more specifically
to secure architecture as well, a lot of processes that
will help you identify your assets,
what threats can be posed to those assets,
and what the impact of those threats
may be if they're actually carried out.
Again, this is very similar to a risk assessment process
as well.
You start off with a list of all the assets you have,
which is why asset management is critically important here.
And then you move on to see-- try to identify what
the possible threats are that are against those assets you
have, and then figure out the potential threats that the--
the potential impacts that those threats could have.
Sorry.
I got a little tongue-tied there.
So again, it's very similar to a risk assessment process.
And then after you've identified what could happen
and what the impact would be, then you
figure out how to defend against those threats.
That's where you start building your actual secure
architecture.
Do you look and see what threats could
be posed to your organization, what the impact they could be,
so you can prioritize those?
And that's when you start building
your secure architecture with those threats in mind
and the countermeasures to help prevent and mitigate
those risks.
There are a lot of different frameworks and models
you can use to help with threat modeling.
Two we're going to talk about specifically in this course
are going to be the Lockheed Martin Cyber Kill Chain
and the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.
There's another one known as STRIDE that we will talk about.
But the two that are most frequently used,
at least in my experience, have been the Cyber Kill Chain
and the MITRE ATT&CK Framework.
So speaking of frameworks, these are basically
documents, program, sets of guidelines
that are designed to make the entire process of building
a secure architecture, threat modeling, whatever you're
doing, to make that process much easier.
Usually, your frameworks are going
to contain sometimes baselines, but essentially, a lot
of times, are going to be guidelines and recommendations
to help streamline a lot of your processes.
All of these guidelines, all these baselines
are almost always customizable to fit in
with whatever your specific organization might need.
A couple of the frameworks that are most commonly
used in cybersecurity and with building
a secure architecture are--
excuse me-- the NIST Cybersecurity Framework,
or CSF.
This is essentially a bunch of guides
for various cybersecurity activities and protections
for an organization that are based on a lot of established
practices and standards that have been used
throughout the years anyway.
And then you have NIST Special Publication 800-53.
These are more guidelines that are
towards specific types of security controls,
not necessarily specific pieces of software,
but towards more specific controls
themselves and the best ways to actually implement
those controls.
You have the ISO 27000 series.
This is a collection of a lot of different standards
and best practices for building security
programs from the ground up.
And that is a big part of building
that secure architecture as well.
Another tool you can use is not fully a framework.
But another tool you can use is the CIS Controls
and their Hardened Images.
This is sets of controls kind of similar to the NIST 800-53,
but they also supply a lot of various hardened
images for prepackaged applications,
or operating system, or things like that, that are based off
of their controls.
But they're basically preconfigured.
So we've talked a lot about what a secure architecture is,
some pieces that can go into it to actually build
these secure architecture.
But why is this so important?
What could possibly happen if we don't have a properly designed
environment here?
Really, starting out with a secure architecture
from the beginning is going to help
you avoid excessive incidents in your organization.
Now, it's impossible to avoid all incidents.
But building out your infrastructure,
designing your network from the ground
up with security in mind, the secure architecture design--
you'll hear me repeat that phrase several times
in this course, I wonder why.
But it's going to help you avoid a lot
of those excessive incidents.
Now, if you don't have a comprehensive design
for your architecture and for your infrastructure,
your maintenance of your network is going to suffer.
The documentation will definitely suffer.
If you don't know what's going on, how can you document it?
And at the same time, if you don't document it,
how can you know what's going on?
And how can you be able to maintain
a non-documented environment?
It becomes a lot harder to do.
You'll have vulnerabilities that will go unpatched
because you may not have a proper asset inventory system.
You may not have a proper vulnerability remediation
program, a management program, a patch management program.
Building a secure architecture, designing it
from the beginning like this includes
all of these components.
You can have attackers that remain
on your network undetected for extended periods of time.
Now, is that possible even with a perfect design?
Of course it is, but it is a lot more likely
if you are not building out the infrastructure with security
in mind.
So some other risks of not implementing
a secure architecture-- you're going
to have a lot more threats coming in through email if you
don't focus where just your security is, you don't identify
email as a potential threat.
And these are just some examples of ones.
Say, if you have insufficient controls for your email.
You don't have things like email filtering,
or maybe URL sandboxing for potential phishing links,
or attachments scanning, or any of those number of things,
you may not have thought of that, because your organization
might not have gone through a full architecture design
process.
It's going to also make it much easier for attackers
to move laterally within your network,
especially if you haven't set up a proper network segmentation.
You don't have proper network monitoring, logging,
and alerting set up, just like improper network segmentation
right there.
Without having these things built in from the beginning,
it makes it a lot easier for your attackers
to exploit your environment.
You may have increased ransomware occurrences
if you don't have proper access controls set up
in your environment.
If you have accounts that have full administrator everywhere,
any kind of malware has a much higher chance
of being able to run if all your users have
administrative access, including ransomware, ransomware just
being the example here because it can be the most damaging,
depending on what's happening.
But all of this is going to result
in lost revenue for your organization,
lawsuits potentially, fines and other financial penalties
to your organization, not to mention just
the issues with public image and public relations
for your company, especially if it's
determined that any breaches were because the network was
never designed properly.
So you can see why secure architecture design is
such an important part of building a proper security
program at an organization and why
it's important to have security in mind from the very beginning
when you're working on building out your environment.