Peter Nichols, Information Security Architect

I am an Information Security Architect with 25 years experience in industry and government IT Security who focuses on:

• Providing reliable IT Infrastructure Services within any corporate culture via gathering and managing IT Infrastructure data and customer requirements to ensure consistent and transparent service delivery to IT customers.

• Developing and implementing a proportional information security management strategy.

• Presenting and preparing Business Continuity awareness to information technologists and business segment leaders.

White Papers:

Discovery Scanning: A discovery of resources on the corporate network is performed via a port scanner. Network resources are categorized so that further vulnerability scanning can be focused on systems that deliver enterprise services.

Vulnerability Scanning: The process of verifying the current operating system configurations are secure. Vulnerability scans run periodically will be used to improve and keep up to date the corporate Operating System Security Standards.

Vulnerability Management Presentation: This document describes a vulnerability management system, its implementation and procedures.

Security Management: Determining the framework for your information security program.

Wireless Scanning: Wireless data communications present risks of a loss of physical containment of data, therefor additional measures must be taken to protect the organization's data. Wireless-enabled organizations need a security solution that discovers WiFi access points and assesses their basic implementation of available 802.11b/g security features and provide clarity on whether they are authorized, ad-hoc or rogue.

Risk Mitigation: When a known vulnerability is discovered or reported, the risk that the vulnerability poses to the agency must be evaluated before any action be considered or taken. Management and employees can then make an informed decision as to what resources should be utilized and what actions taken to proportionally mitigate the risk or close the security hole.

Understanding Viruses and Worms: Using manipulation, influence and deception to get a person (often a trusted insider to an organization) to comply with a request. The end goal of the request is to get the target to release information or to perform an action that benefits the attacker.

ASP .NET to Active Directory: A dated, but still useful methodology for connecting web applications to Windows Active Directory.

Security Awareness at Home: This document describes some of the challenges internet (and MMORG users) specifically face in securing their systems.

Stateful Firewalls: A presentation on how stateful firewalls work directed at application developers and systems integrators.

Cloud Applet Security Review: An introduction to reviewing applications hosted on PaaS/SaaS for application programmers and business line managers.

Assessing SaaS/PaaS for your organization. An introduction to assessing Software and Platform as a Service (SaaS/PaaS) systems using the NIST 800-37 risk management framework.

SAMLv2 Implementation via ADSF: Cloud based applications that require authentication and authorization such as Salesforce, Mimecast, and WebEx must use a secure mechanism. The Security Assertion Markup Language is the current industry standard to get this done.

Enterprise Architecture: This presentation provides an overview of the duties of an Enterprise Architect. A version of this presentation was given to the regional Phantom User Group in 2018.