Basic Security Issues For Conducting Business On The Internet

Conducting business on the Internet requires theinterface on which to place public facing servers
consideration of various security issues. Security policyinstead of on the private internal network. The firewall
development, security awareness training, or theshould also be resilient enough to be able to defend
various other components of the CIA (Confidentiality,against denial of service (DOS) and other Internet
Integrity, and Availability) information security mantra willbased attacks. Internet traffic on the DMZ should be
not be discussed, instead this article will focus on themonitored via intrusion detection and/or prevention
basic types of security that businesses on the Internetsystems tied into an incident response plan in the
need to address to secure their website from othersevent malicious activity is identified.
with mal-intent.The business should also contact their domain name
An organization must initially assess its systems orregistrar and pay the additional fee so as to lock the
functions and rate the operational criticality of each.domain name to prevent hackers from highjacking the
The reason for this is that security implementationsweb address by submitting a spoofed or forged
can be quite expensive and being able to determinedomain name change request. Hardening the public or
the must have versus the nice to have through a riskoutside domain name server is also critical so that
based approach is vital to ensure that funds arehackers do not gain access to it and change its entries
directed towards the assets that are most at risk.to redirect your web traffic to an alternate
In general terms, a business with a presence on theunauthorized website (also a form of domain name
Internet has to protect its website/server, associatedhighjacking). Once a domain name change is made
infrastructure, bandwidth, and its domain name. Internetand propagated throughout the Internet it could take
service obtained through a service provider must beseveral days to re-propagate a correction.
sufficient in bandwidth for expected traffic, have theThis article is not all inclusive and has not addressed
ability to scale based on demand requirements, and, ifother related subjects such as web server hardening
possible, provide some level attack filtering beforeor transactional security and non-repudiation for
reaching the organization's network border. The nextecommerce, but its purpose is to convey an indication
consideration would be to obtain a firewall system thatof the scope of required considerations in securing an
provides for a semi-secure demilitarized zone (DMZ)organization's online presence.