Summary

The threat against our systems and information has never been greater; yet, the primary reason we lose is because we sometimes fail to apply good security design and practice. 2004 was the year of the worm, with over a dozen NetSky versions, reruns of MSBlast, and Sasser. However, almost all the attacks exploited known vulnerabilities for which patches were available. If we take the responsibility to implement sound design and security practice, we can move forward. There is no single silver bullet, no magic product, no vendor that will do it all for us. On the other hand, tools both free and commercial are available that we can use to build an architecture that layers defense in depth.