An overview of network security

When dealing with network security, we should always strive to implement as many security mechanisms as our application design and budget will support. Think of network security as an onion – the more layers the onion has, the more work there will be to get to the middle of it. The same idea applies to providing network security.

The more security devices we implement, the harder it will be for malicious traffic to reach our application. We should be thinking about network security at all the layers of our application. We need to be careful, especially when it comes to identifying our entry points and protecting each of them with the appropriate security measures.

The following diagram breaks down the attack vectors according to Verisign. The diagram represents the security breaches that were successful in 2018 and network security only accounts for about one fifth of the attacks leading to a breach:

Contrary to popular belief, it is not the lone hacker intent on penetrating our network firewall that's the biggest concern when we talk about network security. Network security is, in fact, a small part of an overall strategy in securing our applications.