Network Security Guidelines and Best Practices
This is a checklist for implementing network security:
- Know your network
- know what exists on the network
- document each device and asset
- Implement information security governance
- Implement methods to detect insider threat
- Perform regular backups
- Update systems and applications regularly
- Educate users on security awareness regularly
- Perform and maintain compliance
- Avoid complicating the network architecture by implementing unnecessary security controls
- Segregate and segment the network
- Aggregate and correlate logs in a centralized location
- use a SEIM for threat identification, security alerts, etc.
- Implement network address translation (NAT)
- Use honeypots and honeynets
- Ensure physical security of network devices and equipment
- Implement data loss solution
- data loss prevention (DLP)
- Perform third-party security assessment of the network
- Implement and incident management process
- Baseline everything
- baseline configuration for all hosts (OS, servers, applications, etc.)
- Perform operating system and application hardening
- Keep only what is necessary
- Integrate security as part of the network design
- Use principle of least privilege
- Avoid using insecure protocols
- Implement defense-in-depth
- Implement a security policy
- Use multi-factor authentication
- Implement complex password policies
- Perform user activity monitoring continuously
- Implement network monitoring tools
- IDS, wireshark, etc
- Perform regular audits