Security has become a huge buzzword in today's online world with practically all information that is important to today's businesses being stored in networked systems and shared via the internet. There is huge customer awareness today about security today and clients demand that hosting environments be compliant with globally adopted enterprise security standards. Instances of security breach are simply not tolerated anymore by today's discerning customers. Whether you're a hosting company or an enterprise having online systems and data, you simply cannot afford to take security lightly any longer.

InstaCarma has several years of experience managing online infrastructure as keeping systems secure is indeed a very important part of server management. This has equipped us with a keen understanding of online server security, attacker trends, vulnerability identification, security principles, diagnostic procedures, and security maintenance.

We're engaged by hosting companies and server owners to help them secure their systems, develop security policies and maintain security. We also help companies meet global security standards like the PCI Data security standard, compliance to which is demanded by most major credit card gateways and banks (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_DSS)

Our security process typically consists of the following :

Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing : We perform various checks and scans on the server to see if any exploitable software or vulnerabilities such as open ports or malicious scripts are found. We check if system software and services are configured for maximum security. This is then followed with attempts to attack the system, which provides further insight into the security of the system. We make use of enterprise grade tools such as Nikto and Nessus scanners for this process.

Server hardening based on the above findings : With the complete list of vulnerabilities and inadequacies in front of us, we go about fixing each and every one of them until the tests turn completely favorable. We have plenty of skill and experience in hardening servers - from hardening kernels, SSH, sysctl.conf, PHP, tmp directories etc, to configuring mod_security rules and setting up firewall, IDS systems etc.

Scheduled security checks : Once server security has been ensured with the above processes, it is important to keep the process of assessing security and maintaining it. For the clients that engage us for regular maintenance of the security of their servers, we check servers every fortnight for vulnerable software, suspicious activity, malicious scripts etc. We set up the server to send email alerts for suspicious activity. Security scans are performed regularly.