Lessons We Can Learn From Airport Security | McAfee Blogs

Most of us don’t have responsibility for airports, but thinking about airport security can teach us lessons about how we consider, design and execute IT security in our enterprise. Airports have to be constantly vigilant from a multitude of threats; terrorists, criminals, rogue employees and their security defenses need to combat major attacks, individual threats, stowaways, smuggling as well as considering the safety of passengers and none of this can stop the smooth flow of travelers as every delay has business knock on effects. Whew! And this is just the start.

The airport operators are a lesson in supply-chain and 3^rd party communications. They cooperate with airlines, retailers and government agencies, and their threats can be catastrophic. They also need to consider mundane problems like how do you move a large number of people around quickly, what to do when someone leaves a bag to go shopping and how to balance risk reduction with traveler comfort – many needs to be considered, planned for and the execution when a risk is identified needs to be immediate. All this before thinking about IT-related issues, thefts from retailers, employee assessments and training, building safety, people tracking and … the list seems almost endless.

Our business IT security needs might not seem so complex; however every enterprise has its external and internal attackers; hackers, ransomware, DDoS attacks to take down your systems and rogue employees or inadvertent actions by good employees who don’t realize what link they are clicking on or data they are over-sharing. At the same time, the business needs to be able to enable the newest and most effective apps and systems and employees hate anything that appears to get in their way.

So, let’s see what airports can teach us about thinking about possible threats and appropriate safeguards to deploy a layered approach that protects your data, users and infrastructure.

If you take just one threat; terrorism as – this image shows that US airports have more than 20 layers of security – a mixture of human and technological measures.

There’s no silver bullet, there’s not one piece of security awareness or technology that will solve all problems – but if integrated, they can all build together to draw a picture of the possible threat.  Our defenses shouldn’t rely on just one technology either, but when we have multiple capabilities working together, we can evaluate, identify and address our security needs.

Here’s my table of some of the needs of an airport and equivalent areas in general IT security. Just as in an airport, individual pieces are of limited benefit unless they are brought together. Even though each item improves overall security, a single management console that can correlate all these pieces of knowledge and suggest or make policy decisions is crucial to ensure you get maximum benefit.

What have we learned?

Firstly, the job of securing an airport is complex and involves a lot of planning, cooperation with 3^rd parties and a vast mixture of people and technology-based security.

Secondly, we cannot rely on one defense, just like airports.

Thirdly, concepts like zero trust, MITRE ATT&CK framework, Cyber Kill Chain are all aiming to look at threats in the round – we need look at threats from every angle we can and implement the best technology we can.

The best solutions will be integrated, you need to be able to collate activity patterns to evaluate risks and define defenses.  McAfee’s Device to Cloud Suites are designed to bring together multiple systems all under one umbrella and let you accelerate cloud adoption, improve productivity and bring together more than ten different security technologies all managed by McAfee ePO.