| In an increasingly hostile corporate world, autonomous systems must identify, detect, and protect valuable corporate assets from numerous threats. They must maintain integrity and accuracy and be responsible for overall system security. For years before the Internet, each corporation was an isolated island where threats usually came from within. Now, outside threats come daily, and security and protection are paramount. Threats must be identified quickly and protective action taken. Autonomic system solutions must address all aspects of system security at the platform, operating system, network, application, Internet, and infrastructure levels. This involves developing new cryptographic techniques and algorithms, their secure implementation, and designing secure networking protocols, operating environments, and mechanisms to monitor and maintain overall system integrity. Such security solutions need to be standardized to provide/preserve interoperability and to ensure that these techniques are used in a correct way. To achieve this will require continuous sensors feeding data to a protection center. A log of events will be written and accessed when appropriate for audit purposes. To manage the threat levels, we might expect a tiered level. Threats can be escalated through the tiers for increasing action and priority. Examples: -
Confirm the ability of backup and recovery resources that may be needed. -
Implement tiered security levels. -
Focus resources on network monitoring and immediately disconnect computer systems with suspicious network traffic. -
Verify that network configurations inventories are correct and, if not, take action. -
Contact system administrators outside of autonomous system and other offices that may be affected by the increasing threat levels. -
Have the system verify that all computer systems are at the appropriate version levels, including "patches." Update automatically as needed. -
Resolve any open security concerns. -
Implement any special software for additional security protection according to the threat level. -
Contact offsite vendors to determine if any preventive measures (patches, etc.) to be applied to both hardware and software. |