Tag Archive for: Cyber hygiene

How Can We Vaccinate Our Networks?

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Security Weekly | December 29, 2020

 

The news is flooded with updates regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.  Cyberattacks are targeting the vaccine supply chain.  Phishing attacks are exploiting sign-ups for the vaccine.  There are even attacks to get access to vaccine data.  Sounds a lot like our enterprises every day!  We’re all learning about human immunology from the headlines, but what are the equivalent defenses for our networks? How do we achieve resilience at scale, when we don’t really have a network immune system?

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To Recover and Rebuild, Look to Technology

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As I write this, our society is amid an economic collapse and social closure the likes of which no one in our lifetime has ever seen. People everywhere are trying to create some kind of certainty so that they can plan their future, get back to their “day job” and feel safe while resuming a normal, active life. While the recovery process will be long and the challenges many, when we emerge on the other side it’ll be our uniquely American characteristics which help us triumph.

A recent op-ed in USA Today perfectly summarized the opportunity this pandemic presents: In recovering and rebuilding, every American should contribute and can do so by utilizing our most unique quality: ingenuity. While many characteristics define us as a nation, ingenuity is the engine which drives our success.

As each industry sector finds ways to contribute, the technology sector has its own unique role to play. Among the many advancements that have proved essential during this time, technology has allowed for productive work away from an office and schooling at a distance, automation has reduced in person interactions and supercomputing has helped model the spread of the disease. It is important that while we adopt new technologies and further embed others ever deeper into our daily lives, we consider how to secure those devices and the networks on which they function. As we apply techniques in the physical world to keep us healthy – handwashing, social distancing – we must also implement cyber hygiene principles to keep our networks healthy.

Implementing cyber hygiene means your organization is less likely to battle common cybersecurity issues. Utilizing a cyber terrain modeling tool like RedSeal as part of regular cyber hygiene practices means executives and business leaders can automatically view and monitor their network and identify potential problems before they manifest. This allows organizations to make better decisions about where to allocate budget and funding and to put greater focus on their primary goals.

Technology can both contribute to solutions and help guard against the challenges we face. Practicing good cyber hygiene keeps businesses healthy so executives and business leaders can focus on what really matters—producing original and inventive ways to improve our society and creating a future we all want to live in.

Real World Versus Cyber Hygiene

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As I watch the drama on the news unfold it is striking to me how similar the tactics for defending against a spreading virus are to cyber defense.

Washing your hands equates almost exactly to cyber hygiene tactics like patching.

Social distancing is nothing more than putting barriers up to prevent the spread of attacks, which is called network segmentation in the cyber world.

What do we do in the cyber world when a system is infected? We quarantine it and try to determine what else could have been infected. Unfortunately for the physical world, there is no automated way to make sure people are practicing proper hygiene, maintaining proper distancing, and isolating infected and vulnerable people. Fortunately, this is not the case for cyber warriors, where RedSeal automates all these arduous tasks.

With RedSeal’s cyber terrain analytics platform and professional services, government agencies improve their resilience to security events by understanding what’s on their networks, how it’s all connected, and the associated risk. RedSeal verifies that network devices are securely configured; validates network segmentation policies; and continuously monitors compliance with policies and regulations. RedSeal continually checks to see if a network’s segmentation is working as designed, ranks end point vulnerabilities in order of risk, and adds knowledge of your network to determine how accessible the vulnerability is to untrusted networks and what it will expose if compromised.

So, when a breach does occur, the RedSeal can tell you exactly what is exposed to an attack and deliver the information needed to contain it.

If only the real world had this capability, I might be able to eat at my favorite restaurant tonight.

Click here to lean more about Cyber Hygiene with RedSeal.

Ten Cybersecurity Fundamentals to Reduce Your Risk of Attack

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Due to escalating tensions with Iran and recent cyber activity against a U.S. Government website, DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency team has issued a bulletin warning organizations to be prepared for “cyber disruptions, suspicious emails, and network delays.” DHS recommends preparing by focusing on “cyber hygiene practices” to defend against the known tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) of Iran-associated threat actors.  This warning serves as another reminder that adversaries often compromise organizations through failures in assessing and implementing basic security practices.

Based on recent international activities announced by DHS, expectations of retaliation from a known adversarial nation state are more than likely to occur. This is an immediate risk to all public and private organizations in the United States. Organizations need to be able to assess their current security posture and accurately evaluate their cyber hygiene. They need to know what is on their networks, how it is all connected and the risk associated with each asset.

Whether you are hands-on-keyboard technician or an executive responsible for securing your organization, here are ten cybersecurity fundamentals you can implement.

  1. Identify critical data and where it is housed
  2. Know what assets – physical and virtual – are on your network
  3. Harden your network devices, making sure they are securely configured
  4. Review your endpoint data sources to make sure you have full coverage of all endpoints on your network
  5. Ensure that your vulnerability scanner is scanning every subnet
  6. Factor in accessibility to prioritize your highest-risk vulnerabilities and hosts
  7. Make sure only approved or authorized access is allowed, including any third-party access.
  8. Validate that all network traffic goes through your security stack(s)
  9. Identify unnecessary ports and protocols
  10. Identify rules on your network gear to determine if they are valid and applied appropriately

By focusing on cybersecurity fundamentals, RedSeal helps government agencies and Global 2000 companies measurably reduce their cyber risk. With our cyber terrain analytics platform and professional services, enterprises improve their resilience to security events by understanding what’s on their networks and how it’s all connected.

RedSeal verifies that network devices are securely configured; validates network segmentation policies; and continuously monitors compliance with policies and regulations. It also prioritizes mitigation based on each vulnerability’s associated risk.

We are proud to be trusted as the central cybersecurity platform in our customers’ defense-in-depth strategy.