Securing Applications with the only features that they provide...

Published: May 27, 2021, 2:49 a.m.

b"

hello everyone my name is vijay kumar Devireddy and i am glad to have you back on my episode 41 today we are discussing about Securing applications.By far the most commonly used productivity suitein the world is Microsoft Office.This includes Word for word processing,Excel for Spreadsheets, PowerPoint for slide presentation,Outlook for email, and many others.Now, how can we protect the applications themselves,and the files that they create?Well, that's what we're going to cover in this lesson.First, let's talk about the obvious.If you have a document and you want to protect its content,you should use a password to do it.It's a really simple built in feature across the Office suite.To create a password to protect your files from modification, or even being viewed,you can do this using the password protect feature under the tools menu bar option.As shown here on the screen, this is an example from Microsoft Word, but it works in Word,Excel and PowerPoint.Also, your files can be set to read only if you desire.This will prevent any of your contents from being modified by unauthorized users. Another thing you want to think about when it comes to security is macros.And we talked about that a bit back when we talked about macro viruses.You want to make sure you check your macro settings. You can find this under your preferences or your tools options, and then going to the security tab.By default, you should want to disable macros,with or without notification. This will increase the security of your organization. Now, when it's installed originally by Microsoft, macros are enabled, so you want to take the time to disable this in your baseline image.Most organizations are going to decide to disable macros completely and not even give their user an option to be able to enable them.To do this, you can set that through your group policy inside the Windows server and push that out to all of your clients. Another way to secure your information is to use digital certificates.If your organization is already using digital certificates as part of its organizational security, you should enable your documents to be locked down and only be opened by the person presenting a valid digital certificate. This again is another option that you can find inside of Word.Additionally, you want to think about how you're going to encrypt your documents to protect their contents.This can be done within the Microsoft Office products themselves, or you can use the underlying system capabilities,something like Bitlocker to Go.So at this point, we have some pretty secure files.We've disabled our macros, we've password protected them and we've encrypted them. Let's go and shift our focus over to email for a moment. Inside the Microsoft Office suite,there's a program called MS Outlook. Microsoft Outlook is used for email and if you embed your digital signatures and digital certificate configurations into Microsoft Outlook, you can haveincreased email security.This relies on a PKI or public key infrastructure.We'll talk about that when we get into the cryptography section of this course later on.Now, another thing when we start talking about Microsoft Outlook is that our emails start getting to be overwhelming sometimes,and we have to start saving space by archiving them off.In Microsoft Outlook, the way we do this is by archiving them to a PST file.

"