The shop that went dark for a day
A shop sells online. One cloud company runs its website, its stock list and its tills. The company has an outage. The shop cannot sell anything for a day.
Good design counts on failure and attack. Today you learn three more design goals.
Key words
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Network | Devices joined together so they can share data. |
| Malware | Software made to do harm. |
| Resilience | Keeps working, even in an attack or a failure. |
| Scalability | Copes when many more people use it. |
| Bottleneck | A tight spot that slows all that comes after it. |
| Denial of service | An attack that floods a system so real users cannot use it. |
| Third party | Another firm that you rely on. |
| Penetration testing | A permitted test where an expert tries to break in, to find weaknesses. |
| Segmentation | Splitting a network into parts. |
| Separation of duties | Splitting a job so no one person can cause harm alone. |
| Anonymisation | Hiding or changing details, so nobody can be named. |
The cells students fill in are left blank in this preview.
By the end of this lesson
Note
I can explain three design goals: make disruption hard, make attacks easy to spot, and limit the harm.
Starter: what you already know
Have a go
Starter: what you already know
3 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.
Make disruption difficult
A system must be resilient. It keeps working in an attack or a failure.
Scalability means it copes with a rush of users. Look for any bottleneck. A flood of traffic can block it in a denial of service attack.
Third parties and testing
Find where you rely on a third party. Then plan for it to fail.
Practise. Run mock attacks, so all know what to do. Use outside penetration testing. It makes your rules hard for a real attacker to find.
Make compromise easier to detect
Collect and read security events and logs. They show actions nobody approved.
Set alerts for known malware. Keep the monitoring tools apart from the working systems. Then alerts and logs still work in an attack.
Learn what a normal day looks like. Odd days then stand out.
Check: disrupt and detect
Have a go
Check: disrupt and detect
4 questionsYour answers are marked here and are not kept. A college account keeps every student’s marks.