Staying on top of security vulnerabilities as an IT admin can feel like a never-ending battle. New threats emerge constantly, critical software needs regular patching, and users let their guard down against social engineering. It’s relentless trying to wrangle all the potential holes that could lead to a data breach or outage.
Balancing security responsibilities with your million other responsibilities is difficult, keeping systems humming. That’s why having a simple checklist covering the most vital security tasks is invaluable.
Referring to this regularly will help you avoid getting buried in less important minutiae so you can focus on what matters most. Consistently checking these security essentials off the list makes your organization’s sensitive data, critical systems, and end users far safer from cyberattacks that seem to grow more sophisticated daily.
1. Scan the Network for Vulnerabilities
Start by thoroughly examining your network perimeter and connected devices for potential security holes. Run comprehensive vulnerability scans to reveal any unpatched operating systems, misconfigurations, open risky ports, running unsecured services, and other weaknesses. Review the rules and traffic flowing through your network firewalls as well.
Your network firewall acts as an important checkpoint, monitoring and controlling what traffic enters and exits different network segments. Scrutinize firewall configs to validate that only authorized traffic aligning with business needs gets allowed while denying malicious traffic.
Prioritize patching critical vulnerabilities immediately to prevent attackers from exploiting them to breach your network. Also address less urgent vulnerabilities in a timely manner through a patch management process.
Rescan your entire network IP range regularly, including both internal and external-facing systems, to detect any new vulnerabilities that may emerge.
To really cover your bases, use both agent-based and agentless vulnerability scanners. Agent-based scanners can find vulnerabilities on servers, devices, and endpoints across the network by installing a small piece of software locally. Meanwhile, agentless scanners remotely scan systems without needing any software installed on the target devices. Using both scanning methods ensures you find a more comprehensive range of security flaws.
Set up recurring scans on a weekly or monthly basis. Always scan following any significant network changes as well to catch any new potential attack surfaces.
2. Review Access Controls and Privilege Management
Now is also the perfect time to examine closely the access controls implemented across your infrastructure to govern system and data access. Carefully review who has been granted access to what resources based on the principle of least privilege.
Scrutinize elevated administrator privileges to ensure only authorized IT staff have that level of access. Examine your user provisioning process regarding adding, changing, and revoking access when staff join, move to new roles, or leave your company.
Shore any deficiencies that give people more excessive permissions than their role requires. This helps guard against malicious insiders and external attackers looking to exploit excess privileges.
To limit opportunities for unauthorized access, reassess access controls at least quarterly or whenever staff changes occur. Also, ensure that access is removed in a timely manner when employees leave the organization.
Look at implementing strong password policies, multi-factor authentication, role-based access controls, privileged access management (PAM) tools, and database access monitoring to strengthen identity and access safeguards.
3. Review Logs and Alerts
While you have heightened security awareness, thoroughly review recent system, network, and application logs for anomalies. Carefully review firewall, VPN, IDS/IPS logs, security event logs, CloudTrail or VPC Flow Logs, etc. Make sure you have log data from all critical infrastructure components forwarded to your central logging server.
Pay special attention to any alerts that indicate potential security incidents that warrant further investigation. Tune detection rules to reduce false positives and highlight true indicators of compromise that warrant your scrutiny.
Make reviewing logs a weekly or daily habit to catch issues fast before they lead to bigger problems down the road. Set aside dedicated time for the IT security team to comb through event data with the latest threat intelligence to uncover signs of compromise early in the attack sequence.
Look at feeding logs into a security information and event management (SIEM) platform to apply risk-based prioritization and machine learning algorithms to logs for automated analysis.
4. Backup Your Data
While not strictly a security control, maintaining complete and recoverable backups of critical business data is an important way to recover from potential ransomware or destructive cyberattacks. Review that backup jobs are completed successfully for your key databases, file servers, document repositories, config files, and transaction logs daily.
Validate that you can successfully restore from backups on a regular basis, not just right after they are created. Backup failures or reliability issues leave you vulnerable to data loss scenarios.
Rotate to new media monthly with at least three prior generations of backups available. Regularly test backups isolated from production networks to ensure malware cannot reinfect your restored data. Frequent, reliable backups let you bounce back faster no matter what gets thrown at you.
If storing locally, make sure to keep backup media physically secure. Encrypt backups to prevent unauthorized access. Have clear policies prohibiting backups from leaving controlled areas or premises without authorization.
5. Review Incident Response Plans
During peaceful times, thoroughly review and refine your security incident response plans. Carefully update incident response procedures to integrate lessons learned from past security events or tests. Brainstorm scenarios and ensure documentation provides clear guidance on roles, responsibilities, communications, stakeholder notification, evidence gathering, and ticketing to streamline response coordination.
Get leadership buy-in on revised plans. Allow IT and security teams to ask clarifying questions about how they should handle various scenarios from initial alert to containment and eradication. Use tabletop exercises to validate completeness and identify gaps. Waiting for a crisis to vet your response plans leads to fumbled responses, so prepare ahead of time via regular dry runs.
Work with department stakeholders in legal, HR, PR, business continuity teams, etc to define their roles and required actions during an incident to ensure a smooth cross-functional response process.
6. Security Awareness Training
Your users are a critical layer of defense against cyberattacks like phishing, ransomware, and social engineering. Develop engaging awareness training content tailored to common risks your users face to change risky computing habits. Test them afterward to drive retention.
Create quick security tip email campaigns reinforcing best practices around passwords, links and attachments, physical security, and data handling. Use real examples of threats detected at your company to raise attention. Ongoing education strengthens your human firewall.
Consider setting up fake phishing attempts targeting users to identify those needing coaching. It lets users locate hoax messages and helps mentor colleagues who fall for the lures with customized guidance.
Final Word
Hopefully, this IT security checklist gives you some quick-win items to tackle this week, if not today. Rinse and repeat this assessment regularly; don’t let it be a one-time thing. Building good security habits pays dividends. Make time to go through this checklist regularly to ensure your organization’s security posture stays strong amid an ever-changing threat landscape. Consistent vigilance is key.
