System Hardening Architecture for Safer Access to Critical Business Data

This paper affirms that the total cost of cybercrime to society is significant, and the threat is growing faster than the potential victims can deal with. One of the factors fueling this rapid growth is the confining of the security of a system to a specific security function. The paper therefore, presents a system hardening architecture to guide system administrators towards implementing multi-layers of in-depth protective mechanisms around stored data. System hardening is a defence strategy, where several different security measures are applied at various layers, all of which must be defeated before a module can be compromised. The protective mechanisms in this architecture are applied to the host, application, operating system, user, and the physical layers. This architecture is proposed on the premise that organisations implementing system hardening security approaches experience safer access to data, as well as decrease in the number of security breaches.http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/njt.v34i4.1