Section 9 - Application Security

Question 2

How do you ensure the security of your web browser?

Answer 2

1. Ensure your web browser is always up to date with patches and updates
2. Don’t adopt the newest browsers when they come out. Let others be the test guinea pigs first.
3. Implement good policies - create and implement web browsing policies as an admin control or technical control
4. Train your users
5. Secure your browser with proxy and content filtering
6. Prevent malicious code from being loaded by configuring your browser to prevent ActiveX controls, Java applets, Javascript, Flash and other active content from being downloaded and run on your machine through your web browser

Question 3

What do proxies do?

Answer 3

Cache the website to reduce requests and bandwidth usage

Question 4

What do content filters do?

Answer 4

These can be used to blacklist specific websites or entire categories of sites

Question 5

What are cookies?

Answer 5

Cookies are text files that are placed on a client’s computer to store information about the user’s browsing habits, their credentials, and other data.

These are used for authentication into websites, session tracking, your shopping carts and many other things.

Question 6

There are two types of cookies. What are they?

Answer 6

Session Cookies

Tracking Cookies

Question 7

This kind of cookie is usually used by spyware to gather details about you. They’re trying to learn what websites you go to, for how long, and what type of things you click on.

Answer 7

Tracking Cookies

Question 8

This kind of cookie are used to keep track of users and their preferences and maybe even the things that they’re putting into their shopping carts. This is used to maintain the connection and the session between you and the server.

Answer 8

Session Cookies

Question 9

Most sites now realize that cookies are not good and have begun using what instead?

Answer 9

Server-Side Tracking

This allows them to do the same type of tracking for your shopping cart and things of that nature while allowing you to block cookies and not have them on your machine.

Question 10

What is an LSO?

Answer 10

Locally Shared Objects

These are cookies that are stored in your Windows user profile under the Flash folder inside your roaming AppData folder.

It is used by Adobe Flash Player and it’s less of an issue now because it’s being phased out in favor of HTML5.

Question 11

LSOs are also known as…?

Answer 11

Flash cookies

Question 12

What are add-on’s?

Answer 12

Small browser extensions or plugins that’ll provide you additional functionality.

Question 13

The most commonly used productivity suite in the world is…?

Answer 13

Microsoft Office

Question 14

What is the best way to protect the applications that we use?

Answer 14

1. If you have a document and you want to protect it, use a password on it.
2. Check your macro settings and disable them if they are enabled. They are installed automatically when first putting Microsoft office on your computer.
3. Use a digital certificate
4. Encrypt your documents

Question 15

How can you increase security on Microsoft outlook?

Answer 15

1. Embed your digital signature
2. If you archive your emails, make sure to save them as a PST file and encrypt that file.

Question 16

Beyond Microsoft Office suite, this is a tool that protects every application out there. What is it?

Answer 16

User Account Control (UAC)

Question 17

This is a security component of Windows Vista and newer operating systems that keeps every user besides your admin account, in a standard user mode.

Answer 17

UAC

*** By doing this, when you want to try to run a program it’s going to ask you if you want it to be run as an admin and if so, you need to put in admin credentials. This prevents unauthorized access and avoids user error in the form of accidental changes.