Chapter 7. Hardening and Security

$3.5 million dollars. For anyone who read that in the voice of Dr. Evil, my hat goes off to you. For anyone who has no idea what I'm talking about, you may have had a sheltered childhood. Joking aside, that number is significant to IT security. Why? Because $3.5 million dollars is the average cost to a business when they are the victim of a data breach. I recently heard this and other scary statistics at a Microsoft conference in Redmond. Some other statistics that can be used in order to get approval for an increase in your security budget—the average number of days an attacker resides in your network before detection is 243. That is the better part of a year that they camp out before doing anything malicious! What are they typically doing during those 243 days? Siphoning all of your data, bit by bit out the back door. Another number is 76%—as in the percentage of network intrusions that happen as a result of compromised user...