Best Defense Practices Against Web Server Attacks by Using and Evaluating NSM Tools

Information nowadays has become the most valuable asset in the innovation market. In addition to the benefits it has brought, this great variety of information that is collected for each company and for each person in particular confronts us with an endless number of new risks and cyber abusers every moment we are “online”. It is now essential for both businesses and ordinary users of information to be protected and in order to be protected as effectively as possible it is needed to have good information security practices. This kind of practice focuses on ensuring the availability, integrity, and confidentiality of information. Although this is generally accepted, developing countries like Albania do not seem to have realized the devastating dangers of information security threats. This paper aims to set out the best Information Security practices for both businesses and ordinary users by showing how to anticipate cyber risks and how to have full visibility of their own data using Network Security Monitoring (NSM) Platforms. Moreover, attention is paid to step-by-step usage, experimentation, and evaluation of the usability and efficiency of such tools comparing a virtual implementation and a real-world implementation of a small campus lab network topology, according to several response evaluation criteria.