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14.1 Security risk management 369

Insider attacks and social engineering

Insider attacks are attacks on a system carried out by a trusted individual (an insider) who abuses that trust. For
example, a nurse, working in a hospital may access confidential medical records of patients that he or she is not
caring for. Insider attacks are difficult to counter because the extra security techniques that may be used would
disrupt trustworthy system users.
Social engineering is a way of fooling accredited users into disclosing their credentials. An attacker can therefore
behave as an insider when accessing the system.
http://www.SoftwareEngineering-9.com/Web/SecurityEng/insiders.html

3. Attack monitoring, detection and recovery includes activities which monitor the
system for unauthorized access, detect, and put in place strategies for resisting
attacks, and backup activities so that normal operation can be resumed after an
external attack.

Security management is vitally important, but it is not usually considered to be
part of application security engineering. Rather, application security engineering is
concerned with designing a system so that it is as secure as possible, given budget
and usability constraints. Part of this process is ‘design for management’, where you
design systems to minimize the chance of security management errors leading to
successful attacks on the system.
For critical control systems and embedded systems, it is normal practice to
select an appropriate infrastructure to support the application system. For exam-
ple, embedded system developers usually choose a real-time operating system
that provides the embedded application with the facilities that it needs. Known
vulnerabilities and security requirements can be taken into account. This means
that an holistic approach can be taken to security engineering. Application secu-
rity requirements may be implemented through the infrastructure or the applica-
tion itself.
However, application systems in an organization are usually implemented using
the existing infrastructure (operating system, database, etc.). Therefore, the risks of
using that infrastructure and its security features must be taken into account as part
of the system design process.

14.1 Security risk management

Security risk assessment and management is essential for effective security engi-
neering. Risk management is concerned with assessing the possible losses that might
ensue from attacks on assets in the system, and balancing these losses against the