What is Information Security? Principles, Types

The rapid increase in the growth of information technology is also increasing the risk of information breaches; urging for a strategy to protect information in a systematic way. Organizations must develop and implement a complete strategy to ensure protection from security risks and safeguard confidential data.

Information Security is a strategic implementation of tools and strategies to secure personal information from unauthorized access involving unlawful activities, disruption, diminishing, or inspection. In this article, we’ll take a closer look on what is information security, what is security data, its principles, protocols, and much more.

Information Security – An Overview

Information Security (sometimes known as InfoSec) covers companies’ methods and techniques to safeguard information. This often consists of various tools that organizations use to protect data by setting policies that stop unofficial people from gaining access to business or confidential information. Information Security is a vast and developing technology that includes a broad range of fields, from network and system security to checking and inspection.

Therefore, information security can be considered as a foundation whose goal is to build security tools, policies and ensure the safety of confidential data (like cognitive data, financial details, etc.). Professionals looking to make it big in the IT industry should enroll for IT security training and get job ready skills.

Data classification is a major constituent of setting up an InfoSec strategy. One may ask what is data classification in information security? It’s the categorization of data based on its level of vulnerability, and the effect on the organization should that data be disclosed, changed, or diminished without authorization. Data classification aids in choosing the suitable baseline security procedures to secure that data.

Principles of Information Security 

InfoSec is primarily based on 3 building blocks: confidentiality, integrity and availability (often termed as CIA triad). Let's take a closer look on what is CIA triad and how the CIA triad protects data.

1. Confidentiality 

Confidentiality evaluates the protection from unofficial information broadcasting. The goal of the confidentiality principle is to keep sensitive information private and to ensure that it is manifest and available only to those who are authorized to use it to fulfill their important or institutional projects.

2. Integrity

The main purpose of the integrity principle is to protect data from being modified in any uncertified way. It provides stability and guarantees that data is correct, authentic, and not modified (addition, deletion, etc.). It continuously protects data from modification, whether coincidentally or unfaithfully.

3. Availability 

The primary objective of availability is to verify that the complete data is available every time (or at any moment) whenever an official person needs it. This means availability is the safeguard to a system's capacity to build technology more effectively, software tools, applications, and data accessible when required for any institutional tasks or any institutional worker.

Types of Information Security

While Information Security can be of numerous types, the most commonly used in the IT sector include:

• Application Security
• Infrastructure Security
• Cloud Security
• Cryptography

Application Security

Application security is a technique to protect applications and programming interfaces (APIs) to stop, identify the bugs and other intrusions in your applications. Application security characteristics contain documentation, authorization, encoding, and application security checking. Organizations can use secure coding practices to minimize vulnerabilities, scanner to continuously detect the new vulnerabilities and Web Application Firewall to secure public application from OWASP Top 10 and other attack vectors.

Infrastructure Security

Infrastructure security refers to machinery assets involving computers, communications systems, and cloud materials. The purpose of infrastructure security covers safety from common cybercrimes and protection from natural calamities and other accidents. Infrastructure security also plays a vital role in reducing the risk of damage due to malfunction.

Cryptography

Cryptography refers to encryption of data to secure information. It is an information security technique that uses codes to safeguard reliable information against cyber risk. To encrypt data, the InfoSec teams apply numerical hypotheses, and a series of rule-based calculations called algorithms to alter messages in ways that are difficult to decode or decrypt.

Cloud Security 

Cloud security is close to the application and infrastructure security, but it is mainly focused on cloud-computing or cloud-connected parts and data. Cloud computing security is another name, cloud security is a group of safety measures developed to secure data, apps, and cloud-based configurations.

Check out our CEH v12 training to learn more about the types of information security and how to protect data from malicious hackers and stop misuse of data. Moving further, we'll look at what Information Security Policies are and why they are important in InfoSec.

Information Security Policy 

Organizations enforcing compliance requires them to have defined policies. Policies provide guidance, consistency, and clarity around an organization’s operations. Similarly, information security policies exist to set a standard around the use of the organization's information technology. They usually consist of:

• Data or sets of data that the policy applies to. 
• A well-defined list of people or programs having access to the said data.
• Guidelines for setting passwords or passcodes.
• Roles of employees in safeguarding of data.
• A data support and operations plan to ensure data availability.

An effective security policy prevents security threats and the risk of information disclosure. This makes the system more practical and worthy to use. You might come across several different terms when examining or designing an Information Security Policy. We’ve tried explaining some of them below:

What is ISMS?

An ISMS (information security management system) represent the collection of rules and methods that IT and commercial organizations use to safeguard their information assets against threats and weaknesses.

What is HTTPS protocol?

Hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) is the most commonly used protocol to receive and send data on the internet. HTTPS is encrypted in order to secure the data being transferred.

What is a network security key?

Network Security Key is a network password or passcode that is used to access the local area network (LAN). The key provides a means to protect the data and establish a secure connection between the client and the host. You may wonder what is network security key for Wi-Fi? It’s usually similar to network security key but used for a wireless area network. It’s used to establish a protected connection between the seeking client and the contributing wireless device, such as routers. 

What is ISO27001?

ISO27001 is the international standard for information security. An ISMS uses ISO27001, which provides help to any group or industry of any size to secure their information in an organized and cheapest way. 

What is an encrypted email?

An encrypted email is simply an email encrypted with an encryption protocol, usually S/MIME and PGP/MIME. The public key infrastructure (PKI) is used to encrypt and decrypt emails. 

What makes a good password?

Strong passwords are key in securing data from malicious hackers. An important aspect of a strong password is length (longer is better). Mix of letters (uppercase and lowercase), numbers, and symbols with no links to personal data or words from dictionaries. 

Information Security Measures 

Information security requires a broad approach of measures to be taken which includes technical, organizational, human, and physical processes.

1. Technical measures include precautions to protect an organization's hardware and software. These usually include encryption, firewalls, and other measures. 
2. Organizational measures include establishing an internal information security department and integrating InfoSec into each department of the organization. 
3. Human measures include training all employees and members of the company on appropriate information security practices and practicing it properly. 
4. Physical measures consist of controlling physical access of personnel to offices, control rooms, and data centers.

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Conclusion

Summing up, information security is the vast growing technology that provides full protection to sensitive private information and makes internet networks reliable. The basic key factors of information security are availability, integrity, accountability, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. 

The primary goal of information security industry is to protect personal information from unofficial activities which leads information security industry to certain excellent execution in the fields like firewalls, legal liability and multi-factor authentication. There are many growing organizations and firm consultants educating and training about information security such as KnowledgeHut IT Security training that supports and offers intelligent information security techniques and methods that teach and polish skills for future and any failure or threat. 

Shortly, the primary goal of information security is to stop the loss of private information, recover loss of authentic details, and protect information from modification. It not only protects local data but data on the cloud as well.