Automation is used all over the world of I.T. and it's certainly used within the world of I.T. Security.
So what I want to do in this episode is talk about some of the automation strategies we use to secure
our infrastructure.
Now unlike what people think we don't just do automation because we're lazy.
Automation provides two big features that we really like.
Number one automation gives us the ability to do something at a very specific time every time with complete
clockwork if we need something done every day.
Automated if you need something done every hour automate it.
Secondly automation does something the exact same way every time.
So unlike three or four commands that I might type in as a human we can create automated scripts that
will automatically do these things for us and they'll do it the same way every time.
So automation gets it every time we want it and automation does it the same way every time.
So with that in mind I want to just run through some scenarios that you'll be running into.
I promise you that you'll run into at least two of these on the security plus exam.
So let's just go through some of these.
The first one I want to talk about where automation is incredibly handy is let's imagine a situation
where you have a classroom with 24 computers in there and at the end of the day you need to reset all
of these systems.
I at total seminars we use a tool called Ghost Norton's ghost has been around forever and it's a wonderful
tool that allows us to take one image and we take that image and restore it out to all of the individual
computers with just a few clicks on one keyboard.
We also see these types of restoring done like for example within Windows itself.
In this case we don't actually use an image per se.
What will go ahead and use installation media so I guess that would be an image but what we'll do instead
is we'll have a template and this template is going to have things like what are you going to name the
computer.
What different applications do you want to have installed those types of things.
And then it will take that image and then using a template file customize that image to be able to do
whatever type of image restoration we need to do.
Another big place we see automation is in continuous monitoring of network devices.
Using tools like SMP we have applications.
Here's one.
This is Zabol that we use here at total seminars that allows us to monitor all of our many different
network devices scattered throughout the office.
Number three would be something as simple as automatic updates of operating systems.
I don't we don't think about it so much but Windows Update is a wonderful tool and it is a complete
automation process and it doesn't really just stop with the OS.
Microsoft will update all of its applications and also it's hard to find a system that doesn't do this
anymore.
Drivers get updated individual applications may not use Windows Update but they use their own update
process.
Even games today all get pretty much automated updates.
Next is going to be monitoring host for application wireless.
Now in other episodes we talk about the idea of application whitelist.
But a lot of these tools will do continuous monitoring where they're going to be watching every individual
host monitoring for unauthorized installations keeping track of inventory and all of this is done completely
automatically.
Then we have things like application development.
Now I'm no programmer but we sure do write a lot of code here in total seminars and to have automated
tools that take care of the application development process.
It really speeds things up in other episodes we talk about things like fuzzing for example the ability
to test for bad inputs into web applications.
So a lot of times with an application development we use can use integration tools that will do things
like fuzzing static testing.
All of this is handled automatically during the actual upload or downloading of code from the developers
themselves.
Last is not so much a strategy but more of make sure you're aware of the tools and that is the idea
of built in tools versus shells.
So many applications have automated scripting tools built into them that you can take advantage of but
also keep in mind that pretty much every operating system has some type of shell like for example the
popular Windows power shell which allows us to generate amazing scripts to do just about anything we
want.
Keep in mind of these different types of automation strategies I guarantee you'll be seeing one if not
two of these on the exam.