Seth Enoka - Cybersecurity for Small Networks : A No-Nonsense Guide for the Reasonably Paranoid

This book is an introduction to cybersecurity, written to help system and network administrators and owners understand the fundamentals of securing a network. Your personal cybersecurity is critical in protecting yourself from fraud and other harmful events attempted by adversaries. Its easy to tell yourself that you cant be a target, that you have nothing an adversary would want to use or exploit. However, your personal identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), intellectual property, and government information and identification all have value. Failing to protect those things can lead to consequences such as identify theft, which can have a serious impact on your life.

For our purposes, a small network consists of 100 or fewer endpoints. An endpoint, or host, is any system or device that connects to or is part of a network, such as a desktop or laptop computer or a mobile device like a phone or tablet. Larger networks, approaching the size of an enterprise network, use similar tools and techniques that are covered in this book to provide security to their users and systems, just on a much larger scale and often at a much higher cost.

The drawback to securing small networks is that you have to maintain and administer everything yourself, with limited support and likely a limited budget. Securing your network will require constant care, and well cover some ways that you can do this cheaply when the need arises. Ultimately, the goal of this book is to arm you with the tools and knowledge to secure your network with whatever resources you have available, in terms of both time and money.

This book is written so that if you follow it logically from chapter to chapter, youll progress through several levels of security maturity, ending with a network that has a defense-in-depth architecture. Defense-in-depth is an approach to cybersecurity where several defensive solutions are layered to protect valuable data and information. focus on the value of regular backups and active defenses, whereby you receive and respond to alerts to suspicious or malicious activity in your network, enabling cyber incident response.

Most chapters contain stand-alone projects. You can choose to complete each project in order, or you can pick and choose which projects you want to complete. However, the concepts covered in earlier chapters on network architecture provide the best return on investment, in terms of both time and money, and require less ongoing support and maintenance. The later chapters that cover active defenses require constant monitoring and are made more efficient with the completion of earlier projects. In some cases, working through the projects in earlier chapters also provides baseline knowledge that may be useful in later projects, such as familiarity with the command line. Essentially, you should complete each chapter in whichever order makes the most sense for you and your environment; for example, if you already have host and network firewalls in place, you can probably skip .