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Secure Your Network NSA-style

Posted by timothy on from the good-idea dept.

farker haiku writes "The NSA has unclassified a pdf on how to secure your network in sixty minutes. All in all, it's an interesting and informative read if you are in the security biz. The article covers a variety of topics such as Buffer Overflows, Intrusion Detection Systems and using Tripwire ASR to ensure the integrity of your network server."

3 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Classified information? by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 3, Insightful



    The NSA has unclassified a pdf on how to secure your network in sixty minutes.

    This was classified? All the information in this document has been freely available on the Web for quite some time now...

    I'm still gonna print this up and put it on my shelf...the NSA logo on the front looks pretty impressive. ^_^

    --
    ____

    ~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey

  2. Faster than 60 minutes.... by Mad_Rain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What about the "Under 60 seconds method for securing your computer" ?

    Step 1. Unplug it.

    Ta-daaaa! Secure at last. ;)

    --
    "What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
  3. Re:Hmm... that document is dated from 2002... by dougmc · · Score: 2, Insightful
    The threats on the internet these days are significantly different from what they were back then.
    Not that different. It's only three years ago, after all.

    Sure, there are certainly some differences, with certain types of threats becoming more common and other sorts of threats becoming less common, but I'm not really aware of any fundamentally new threats appearing during that period, at least not anything that the `old' defenses (as described by this paper) aren't effective against.

    Probably the biggest change would be the general switch to massive DDoS attacks using an army of compromised machines, rather than an attack from a few machines. The concept certainly existed before 2002, but it's really become a problem since then. And ultimately, the `NSA-style' response is likely to be the same -- the important systems aren't on the Internet, so they're not vulnerable. (And if their internal network did have such a problem, they'd have much bigger problems than just a DoS attack.)

    Ultimately, it's not a bad document, but you can find similar things without going to the NSA, and they've been available for a lot longer than three years.