asset security protection associates and petty officers share similar skills sets, but the two careers also differ in other areas. For example, petty officers typically earn a lower salary than asset protection associates.
Preventive measures
Asset security protection safeguards your business from a range of threats, including crime (eg theft and hacking), fire, flood, and other natural disasters. It also protects your strategic information, commercially sensitive data and intangible assets such as intellectual property.
Using a layered approach, asset protection professionals use a combination of preventive measures to protect critical assets. These include implementing measures at the physical, logical, and application layers of protection, based on the threat probability and the risk tolerance of the company.
Physical security is the most fundamental aspect of asset protection. It includes limiting access to facilities, premises, and other physical assets to authorized individuals. It also includes a variety of other measures to prevent unauthorized access, such as locks on doors, requiring a strong password, and storing assets in a secure location.
Intangible assets such as business plans, patents, inventions, and designs can also be subject to loss or damage. Often, these are more difficult to insure than hard assets such as merchandise.
Asset protection professionals
Asset protection professionals need to be knowledgeable about all of the assets in a company, their value and materiality. Moreover, they should be intimately familiar with the concepts of security risk management, and incorporate them into their mind-set and business practices at all levels.
As a preventive measure, asset protection teams identify best practices for each of the assets they manage. They then implement those best practices in a consistent manner across all instances of that asset.
Preventive measures can be a cost-effective way to improve visibility and reduce the likelihood of human errors.
In a world of less tangible retailer assets, the enemies of carelessness and ignorance can be more dangerous than determined bad guys who steal from shelves. This is why it’s important to consider a comprehensive risk mitigation strategy that takes into account the five avenues to address threats, the Four D’s of deter, deny, detect, and delay, and layered security.
Detective measures
Detective measures are a part of asset security protection and include anything that helps to detect unwanted or unauthorized activity before it occurs. This includes physical controls, technical and administrative controls.
In most cases, preventive measures are the best option for minimizing the risk of security breaches. The best preventive measures are designed to keep bad actors out of a business and prevent their access to critical assets before they even have the opportunity to do damage.
Some examples of preventive measures are firewalls, antivirus software, data encryption, logical access control, and job rotation. The types of controls a company can implement depend on the level of risk they face and what resources are available to them.
These controls also help to reduce the amount of time a company needs to spend monitoring and responding to incidents that may occur. They also allow the company to better understand the threat environment and how it may be mitigated.
Detection System
Another type of detective measure is an IPS or intrusion detection system, which monitors network traffic and detects unusual patterns that could indicate malicious activity. The system can then automatically drop packets or reset connections if there is a problem.
The main goal of detective measures is to alert the organization to a potential security breach and provide the necessary information to respond quickly. These are often used in conjunction with other control measures to form a defense-in-depth approach to protecting an organization’s information technology assets.
Technical detective measures are a mix of physical and technical, including IPSs, IDSs, honeypots, and network firewalls. These are usually combined with signature-based approaches (similar to antivirus scanners) and anomaly-based detection. This provides a more comprehensive analysis of suspicious traffic, but also has the disadvantage of false alerts.
Regardless of the type, detective measures are crucial for providing evidence that preventive controls are operating as intended and helping to mitigate the risk of an attack. They are also important to help identify gaps in processes that may lead to errors or irregularities. For example, a detective control may discover that employees don’t properly decrement parts after quality checks. This information can be used to modify training and policies, and to create a corrective action plan.
Isolation measures
Asset security protection focuses on protecting business-critical data and applications. For example, healthcare organizations protect patient information, and aerospace systems manufacturers protect intellectual property. All these assets are different, and the sensitivity of their risk can vary widely. In order to implement effective protection, you must identify the asset types and security requirements for each. Then, you must design controls that align with policy, standards, and architecture.
Isolation measures isolate assets, such as web-facing applications, from the rest of your network. These measures can include the use of a firewall or virtualization. The most effective isolation measures are those that create a sandbox environment for web-facing applications, which restricts access to these programs by preventing the spread of malware.
This can prevent a malicious attacker from accessing the system and using it to compromise your business. However, you should be careful about the amount of network isolation that you choose. You should never leave an insecure system connected to a production network, because this can allow an attacker to gain access to other assets within your organization.
Monitoring measures
When it comes to asset security protection, monitoring is key. This includes not only tracking equipment, but also managing and controlling employee behavior. This helps to prevent theft, reduce downtime, extend the life of assets and more.
It’s worth noting that a well-designed CCM solution can provide up-to-date asset and inventory management metrics.
A comprehensive security management platform should include a wide array of security technologies to ensure the most efficient and effective security operations. These include continuous controls monitoring (CCM), network analytics, mobile device security, vulnerability management, unified threat management, and intrusion detection and prevention solutions. It’s also important to have a clear understanding of how each technology supports the security objectives of confidentiality, integrity and availability. This is especially true for high-value assets. It’s not uncommon for a theft of these valuables to result in serious financial losses.
