Reducing Attack Exposure for Internet-Facing Applications

From: The Essentials Series: IT Compliance - Volume II

By: Rebecca Herold

Build In Security

The more software you have and the more options that are available for client machines to communicate with your software, the less secure your networks and data.

Increasing complexity increases vulnerabilities.

• If you have just one non-secured application, you open a potential attack path that may be exploited, circumventing all the other security you’ve implemented on your other servers and possibly allowing a nice little pathway through your firewall via that application vulnerability in ways that other direct attacks upon the firewall would fail. Figure 1 shows how, with even the strongest firewalls and applications, just the existence of one application could allow an attacker to wreak havoc throughout your network and your organization by shutting down access to the systems upon which you depend to conduct business.