How To Prevent Unpatched Vulnerabilities From Being A Source Of Attack?
With all the unpatched vulnerabilities within a month without an announcement of hacking and investigation to know the culprits. Sometimes companies or individuals, true hunters of vulnerabilities, who have revealed the existence of flaws, sometimes it is the publishers who have been slow to publish the patches, often it is the companies or users who have not make the effort to install these famous patches. In this article, we will discuss the concept of patch management and its importance. We have all heard about vulnerabilities and security threats in information systems.
Any object capable of communicating over a network is likely to have flaws that could be exploited by an attacker to harm. It is therefore important to protect yourself by ensuring that the information system is up to date, which is where the notion of Patch Management comes into play. Patch management is a technique that allows the management of security patches and their deployment in companies. Indeed, whenever vulnerabilities or vulnerabilities are discovered in systems, applications, etc. Publishers take care to make the patches and make them available to their customers.
It will then be for a company to have procedures that will allow applying these patches on the systems and applications concerned. 53% of successful attacks come from exploitation of vulnerabilities on systems According to a Forrester study, 53% of successful attacks come from the exploitation of vulnerabilities on systems, and for which patches were nevertheless available. They want to cry case is a perfect example because hackers exploited uncorrected vulnerabilities in servers running Windows 8.
If the vulnerability and its associated patch were known, how it was exploited by malicious people will tell me -you. Companies are sometimes cautious about implementing fixes immediately because often the park has workstations, servers, and applications with critical services that the company cannot afford to stop, even a few seconds to apply the necessary patch.
Also, publishers have not necessarily tested their patches before publishing. It can be a critical vulnerability discovery that forces a publisher to develop a patch as soon as possible. In addition, each company has its own applications, services, and configurations. It is impossible for the editor to carry out sharp tests. In this case, the company cannot implement the patches without knowing their effects on the systems concerned especially for servers and critical applications. Thus, one of the main fears of companies is the dysfunction of their service. In this case, how can we prevent hackers from using these vulnerabilities?
It Is Therefore Important To Patch Your Computer Correctly:
1. Company Assets:
Inventory of company assets It is impossible for a company to protect its systems without knowing exactly what assets it has and what their level of risk is on the company’s infrastructure. The level of risk can be defined by a mathematical formula: Level of risk = Potential impacts × Probability of occurrence Operational protection. It is therefore important for the company to establish the inventory of machines and to classify them by level of risk. SAM (software asset management) solutions can help you automate the discovery and inventory of your software and hardware assets, wherever they are.
2. Security Vulnerabilities
Every day, 300 new unpatched vulnerabilities are announced worldwide. You will understand that security teams can quickly become overwhelmed by the threats that affect them. In these circumstances, it is difficult to allocate internal resources for this supervision. Organizations must, therefore, find a reliable vulnerability management solution to handle it, providing not raw information but qualified information. Dedicated tools integrated with SAM solutions can help them map existing applications and highlight critical threats to determine which ones require immediate action. Vulnerability scanners can help identify corporate assets by mapping the company’s network to detect vulnerabilities and classifying threat threats by threat level. If the patches cannot be applied immediately it will be necessary to apply a virtual patching solution or to isolate the machine from the network. Virtual patching is the process of creating and implementing a temporary policy used to mitigate the operational risks associated with discovering new security vulnerabilities. It eliminates the potential threat that application or system security vulnerabilities are identified and exploited by hackers. Within SERMA NES we can propose and integrate for you this type of solution. However, there are also flaws that publishers do not know about before they are made public. Therefore, there is no patch and the flaw can be exploited freely by hackers.
This type of flaw is commonly called Zero-day. For the more curious, on the site of ZDI, we can see the latest vulnerabilities zero-day published by researchers. Other precautionary measures are: Set up protection against malicious traffic such as IPS and WAF Avoid the use of software and obsolete OS Deploy an antivirus on servers. However, as everyone knows the effectiveness of a security policy depends on responsiveness. Each equipment or process referring to it, therefore, requires continuous monitoring and expertise. Therefore, the SOC proposed by SERMA NES will allow you to continuously monitor the threat management of your computer.