Knowing the requirements of information security will allow you to know how to find the best tool and how to adapt it to the needs of your company.
The risks of cybercriminal attacks and virtual threats grow every day. It is necessary for companies to always be looking for information security solutions and tools.
Initially, these attacks can cause loss or leakage of confidential and extremely important data in your infrastructure.
The relationship between LGPD (General Data Protection Law) and information security refers to privacy and personal data protection.
The law also brings several benefits to the company regarding security practices by providing for the use of administrative and technical measures that enhance cybersecurity.
According to Veronis‘ survey, only 5% of a company’s files are properly protected.
In this article, we will address the following topics:
- What are requirements?
- What is information security?
- Information security requirements
- How to boost your business with information security requirements?
- Monitora is your ally in information security requirements
What are requirements?
Requirements is a term used in all areas, and generally describes a need or desire, sometimes personal, sometimes of an organization.
Such desires are not always explicit, documented, or even clear to those who want them.
However, bringing the term to the technology field, a requirement is something that a system or component needs to have to meet a standard, specification, or contract.
What is information security?
The concept of information security can be divided into two parts:
Information: Valuable content for an individual or legal entity;
Security: Perception against dangers, uncertainties, and threats;
Therefore, information security is a set of tools and strategies to manage policies and processes that are necessary for the detection, combating, and prevention of threats to information.
And what is part of information security are software, computers, networks, employees, and hardware.
Some of the most commonly used methodologies in investigating security requirements are:
- Data classification.
- Abuse and use case modeling.
- Object-subject matrix.
- Opinion surveys (such as questionnaires and interviews).
- Policy decomposition.
- Brainstorming.
In other words, protecting data against external and internal threats requires ensuring some basic principles of information security. In summary, some examples would be Integrity, Confidentiality, and Availability (ICA).
Therefore, learn more about these three main principles, also known as the sacred triad, and about three other very important principles, which are Irreversibility, Compliance, and Authenticity.
Principle of Integrity
The principle of integrity is linked to data reliability. In this perspective, its main goal is to ensure that the company can use information efficiently, keeping it always accurate and without any alteration.
Therefore, this principle is very important for the current business scenario, and any external interference can result in information tampering, leading professionals to make incorrect decisions that can result in a loss of competitiveness, for example.
The tools that support the principle of Integrity are Backup and Digital Signature.
Backup: When information is corrupted for any reason, it becomes unavailable. And the recovery of this information is done through Backup, which guarantees the completeness of the information.
Digital Signature: When a document is digitally signed, any changes made to it will result in a violation of that signature. Therefore, whenever there is a change in documentation, a new signature will be required, thus ensuring control of these changes in the document.
Therefore, here are some examples:
- To allow the interested party to validate the accuracy and completeness of the software to be published, it is necessary to offer along with it the checksum and the hash function used to compute the checksum.
- All input forms and query strings need to be validated against a set of acceptable inputs before the software accepts them for processing.
- Therefore, all non-human individuals, such as a system or batch processes, need to be specified, monitored, and prevented from altering data as it passes through the system they run on, unless authorized to do so.
Confidentiality Principle
The confidentiality or privacy principle ensures that unauthorized individuals have limited access to information, allowing access only to people, systems, processes, machines, and other legitimately authorized entities.
Therefore, the tool that supports the confidentiality principle is Cryptography.
Cryptography: A technique that scrambles information through algorithms, making data indecipherable.
Availability Principle
The availability principle ensures the accessibility of an institution’s information and systems, allowing employees to access them at any time.
Thus, when a company’s information becomes unavailable, it can have severe consequences, such as interruptions in activities that depend on them and loss of sales due to the inability to access commercial data.
It can also result in a production pause due to non-operating systems and internal and external communications.
In summary, we can use the importance of security in banking transactions as an example. There are situations where the transfer of values must happen immediately, and the PIX can also be highlighted.
Learn about the tools that support the principle of availability:
Firewall: A protective barrier against potential attacks that aim to disrupt services. The firewall prevents the environment from being invaded.
Backup: When information becomes corrupted for any reason, it becomes unavailable. The recovery of this information is done through Backup.
Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS): A device that is powered by batteries, with the capacity to supply electrical energy to a system during a specific period, such as emergencies, like a power outage. The UPS prevents the system from shutting down and is a tool of the availability principle.
Finally, here are some examples:
- The software must offer high availability of eight (8) nines (9), as defined by the SLA.
- The software and its data must be replicated by all data centers to provide load balancing and redundancy.
- Mission-critical functionality in the software must be restored to normal operation within 1 hour of discontinuity; essential functionality in the software must be restored to normal operation within 4 hours of interruption, and support functionality in the software must be restored to normal operation within twenty-four hours.
- The software must be prepared to handle a maximum capacity of three hundred synchronous users.
Non-repudiation Principle
The non-repudiation principle, also known as the non-rejection principle, is the combination of the authenticity and integrity principles, guaranteeing the authenticity of a document when used by certain tools, such as a Digital Certificate.
That is, a person or entity cannot deny authorship of the provided information. When we digitally sign a document, we ensure two of the basic principles of information security: authenticity and integrity.
This principle is already widely used in the criminal field, especially in digitally committed crimes, such as homophobia, hate speech, religious intolerance, and others on social networks, for example.
Principle of Compliance
The Principle of Compliance was established to ensure that all necessary protocols, such as laws and regulations within the sector, are followed.
Principle of Authenticity
The Principle of Authenticity ensures that data is truly from a specific source, ensuring that it was issued, destroyed, created or altered by a certain agency, system or entity.
The tools that support the principle of Authenticity are:
Digital Certificate: Digital Certificates support the veracity of the authorship of websites. For example, when a user accesses an e-commerce site, there is usually a lock in the corner of the screen that displays the digital certificate of the site, confirming that the site actually belongs to that company.
Digital Signature: The purpose of the Digital Signature is to guarantee authenticity, uniquely identifying the author of the information.
Biometrics: a tool that aims to verify some physical characteristics of the person in order to certify that that characteristic uniquely identifies the individual. Biometrics can be found in various areas and even on smartphones, and is also widely used in banks.
The entire concept of information security was standardized by ISO/IEC 17799:2005.
Information security requirements
Information systems include operational processes, services and applications, infrastructure, ready-made products, and operating systems that have been developed for users.
Thus, the creation and implementation of the information system that supports the operational process can be a cause that determines how security will be configured.
Therefore, before the development and implementation of information systems, security requirements need to be agreed upon and documented.
When security requirements are documented during risk analysis and requirements specification for the project, they are justified, agreed upon, and documented as part of a business case for an information system.
LGPD Standards
Inspired by the guidelines imposed by GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe, the entry of the General Data Protection Law at the end of 2020 brought changes to professionals who work with technology and data handling as a whole.
The General Data Protection Law (LGPD), Law No. 13.709/2018, was decreed for the protection of fundamental rights of freedom and privacy and also the free formation of the personality of each individual.
Law No. 13.709/2018 – it aims to organize the “processing of personal data, including in digital media, by a natural person or by a public or private legal entity, with the aim of protecting fundamental rights of freedom and privacy and the free development of the natural person’s personality.”
The LGPD standards also have principles that structure it, namely:
- Accountability and accountability;
- Necessity;
- Non-discrimination;
- Transparency;
- Prevention;
- Free access;
- Purpose;
- Security;
- Data quality;
- Adequacy;
How to boost your business with information security requirements?
A company that does not invest in good information security is exposed and vulnerable to system failures, data exposure, and errors. Therefore, understanding the importance of information security through its five main functions is critical:
Data protection
Adequate control of access to data, encryption, and threat management are essential to ensure that critical or confidential information is always protected against invasions and leaks.
Consumer/user security
This includes end-user security awareness and training to limit end-user exploitation.
Innovation
The company needs to have a strategy that offers and implements support for innovative processes and allows freedom to use new technologies in information security.
Information security management
The management of information security relates to the adoption of tactics that consolidate information security. Information security management encompasses the use of controls:
Physical:
- systems for registering people or vehicles that log into a restricted area;
- armor;
- security professionals;
- CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television);
Logical:
- hashing: the use of algorithms for hashing enables the verification of information integrity;
- protocols: protocols are communication parameters in a network or between networks, such as HTTPS;
- event logs: operating systems and software record events through what is known as logs;
- firewalls: attest that only enabled connections can access a network or computer;
- honeypot: a resource used to deceive intruders, the honeypot simulates security flaws that do not exist in order to collect data from intruders;
- cryptography: information that is in an unreadable configuration for anyone who does not have its key to access it;
Administrative:
- policies;
- practices;
- recommendations and procedures adopted by the company to ensure the protection of information.
Security awareness
It is important to develop a strategy aimed at increasing the organization’s overall awareness of information security, in order to ensure that privacy and security issues are minimized.
Risk management
On the other hand, information security also needs to be supported by prevention, definition and quantification strategies, risk anticipation and management in a way that minimally affects the system.
For this reason, it is also highly recommended that the company work with risk management and IT infrastructure management.
IT risk management: IT risk management is a combination of processes and means installed by companies with the objective of seeking stability between risks and operation costs, identifying, assessing, and monitoring threats related to information technology.
Therefore, besides mapping potential risks and defining an action plan to reduce these possible dangers, a logical ability is required to be able to make calculations and measure real threats.
IT infrastructure management: IT infrastructure management refers to an activity related to the administration of IT resources used by a company or institution.
Therefore, IT infrastructure management has several tools and resources available and aims to optimize a company’s data flow, establish a set of policies and best practices in the information technology sector, ensure efficiency in the sector’s work, facilitate the adaptation of different tools and eliminate duplicate processes.
It is also responsible for establishing IT infrastructure indicators. They are fundamental to verifying the efficiency of the sector since through these metrics, it is possible to verify if the segment is working in a way that favors the achievement of organizational objectives. And to optimize IT infrastructure, it is important and essential to have the appropriate tools.
Monitora is your ally in information security requirements
Finally, Monitora specializes in providing development teams and processes for leading companies in their segments that invest in digital evolution to deliver results and stay on top.
Furthermore, investing in information security requires a new perspective on the importance and value of data and the use of technologies.
We have shown throughout this article many reasons why information security should be a strategy for your business.
Monitora combines innovation, reliability, and keeps your company focused on goals, while team formation, development processes, team management, and results creation are left to us. Contact Monitora.
