Phase 1

The Grunt Work of Security

There is an old saying that success is doing what’s right at the right time. While the individual who created this quote may not have been thinking of security in particular, security professionals can most certainly learn from this saying. Security is about doing the right thing at the right time. Before you can run a password-cracking tool, perform penetration tests, or fire up a vulnerability scanner, you must cover some basic groundwork. That grunt work is the subject of this first phase.

The groundwork of security requires that you know what is worth securing. Companies don’t have unlimited funds, so a big part of the security process is finding what is most critical to the organization and focusing your ...

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