Information security is an important topic for businesses, organizations, and individuals, as it concerns the protection of sensitive data from attack, theft, or misuse. It is also known as cyber security, as it focuses on the protection of digital information from unauthorized access and exploitation.
In this blog, we'll be exploring the basic terminologies that should be known about information security. We'll start with a few of the most common terms that we often come across – Asset, Threat, Controls, Breach, Attack, Vulnerability, etc.
Information Asset is any asset that can create and store processes or information Some of the familiar examples are laptops, desktops, applications, servers, networking devices, and even people are information assets.
The information assets having weaknesses are called vulnerabilities For Instance, Consider that you have a system and if anybody can log in to the system without providing a username and password, is a weakness, and that is called a vulnerability.
Vulnerabilities can be exploited by threats, and when threats exploit vulnerabilities, the security of the information asset is compromised, Threats can be anything that can compromise our information assets. For Example, Hacking, Accidents, Natural disasters, etc., would cause damage to our assets.
Threats exploit vulnerabilities and weaknesses in information assets, and when a threat exploits vulnerabilities, it leads to losses, and the yearly losses that occur are called risks.
So the purpose and intention of every security professional are to lower the risk and losses to make information assets more secure.
To make the information assets secure, we will implement controls (generally to control loss) as a countermeasure.
If somebody is trying to circumvent the controls, that is called an attack, so when we say an attack is happening means someone is trying to bypass our controls, they have not succeeded, but they are trying to bypass it.
If they had succeeded in bypassing the controls, then that is called a Breach/Intrusion.
A security incident is a general term that has the potential to violate security if an attack or breach occurs that may qualify as a security incident.
So these are general terms related to infosec, and these are normally what we hear and need to know about
Hope the concepts are clear
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post, and I hope that it has been helpful to you.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please comment below and let me know your thoughts!