IS20 Security Controls Certification

Maintain an accurate inventory of authorized and unauthorized software across all devices, including patch levels, and use whitelisting and endpoint security to detect and remove unauthorized programs.

Implement secure configurations for laptops, workstations, and servers; harden images, disable unused accounts and services, close ports, apply patches, and enforce change management with hashing for integrity.

Learn how to secure network devices—firewalls, routers, and switches—by enforcing strict configurations, evaluating exceptions, applying change management, and using encryption and multi-factor authentication to protect data and continuity.

Implement multi layered boundary defense by securing perimeter systems, deploying firewalls, proxies, and DMZs; use network segmentation and IDS/IPS to reduce attack surface and enforce two-factor remote access.

Maintain, monitor, and analyze audit logs as a critical control to expose network attacks, using standardized, verbose logging; write logs to separate servers, synchronize time, and review anomalies weekly.

Explore how attackers exploit application software through input validation failures, including buffer overflows and SQL injection. Learn to secure apps with testing, sanitizing input, and secure coding practices.

Limit and audit administrative privileges to prevent attackers spreading inside the organization. Enforce strong passwords (12 characters, complexity), replace defaults, hash storage, unique accounts, regular changes, and two-factor authentication.

Implement need-to-know access by tiering data and requiring authentication for shared folders, apply NTFS permissions and least-privilege, and audit logs to detect anomalies and confirm tests.

Learn how continuous vulnerability assessment and remediation, through automated authenticated scans and timely patches, reduce attacker access while applying compensating controls when patches cannot be deployed.