Utilizing the data organizations and giving teams a single location for a unified view of all that data can help security teams evolve their approach to security.
Corporate networks have fragmented, becoming dispersed, ephemeral, encrypted, and diverse (DEED). These DEED environments compromise network visibility, the security team’s capacity to secure it, and the conventional tools security teams use to defend them. Businesses that fail to recognize and address security blind spots put themselves at risk. These security flaws could lead to expenses for managing security incidents or conducting investigations into them, legal or regulatory penalties, and frequent reputational losses that could result in irreparable harm.
An organization’s lack of understanding of these risks brings issues with digital enablement, education, and stakeholder communication.
It is imperative to address the following critical security blind spots to gain visibility and ultimately change the organization’s cyber security posture.
Non-traceable or shadow IT assets
Accurately identifying the organization’s technology assets should be of the utmost importance. While doing so, companies must consider both current and historical information assets. It is challenging to keep track of the different tools, programs, and services that employees in an organization use. As a result, correctly sizing vulnerability scans (infra and application) and IT risk assessments becomes challenging. What cannot be seen cannot be safeguarded.
Also Read: Improve Hybrid Infrastructure Security with SASE Solutions
Passwords
More than 69% of small businesses impose lax password rules. Organizations know how challenging it can be to create passwords that satisfy the complexity requirements and are simple to remember. Employees frequently make weak passwords or reuse passwords across multiple accounts. System administrators often use default passwords on networking devices, firewalls, etc. Strong password policies are one way that CISOs and CIOs try to solve this issue. The problem worsens when development teams hardcode passwords in applications used in production environments, which frequently goes unnoticed by the security team.
System vulnerabilities
Security patching is crucial for cybersecurity but can occasionally be complicated because of many CVEs. Installing patches is an important activity, taking into account their effect on legacy applications and systems. Additionally, all patches must be tested before being implemented in live environments. It is necessary to isolate legacy systems and applications within a bubble, separate from the leading network, and restrict access to the internet. To ensure the organization’s security, security teams must develop a vulnerability management strategy considering the abovementioned scenarios.
Ransomware and Phishing
People are the weakest link in security. A lack of modern security tools and inadequate security awareness raise an organization’s security risk. Incoming network traffic must be visible and adequately filtered to protect from phishing and ransomware attacks,
Privileged User Administration
Standard users occasionally receive privileged access to carry out specific tasks. It becomes essential to track who has access to privileges, approve them, and periodically review them. Only a few essential users should have access to privileges, which should have only for a short time. Passwords for accounts with system or network privileges must be changed after each use, especially if given to standard users.
Internal Threat
Recent statistics on data breaches show that 63% of successful attacks originate internally. Security teams frequently concentrate on external threat vectors while neglecting any insider threat vectors that might be detrimental to the organization. Insider malfeasance often goes unreported due to “Trust” and lax monitoring, among other things. Organizations must conduct investigations to rule out potential malicious behavior from triggers like disgruntled workers or contractors, careless employees, or inside agents.
Third-Party Threats
Businesses contract with outside parties to outsource a portion of their operational tasks. This makes it easier to use resources as needed without raising CAPEX. However, depending on the level of access to organizational resources OR the importance of the data, periodic due diligence must be done on third parties.
Blind spots are prevalent due to three primary causes:
Deep Packet Inspection is Becoming Less Effective
Various network visibility and security tools organizations have historically used are becoming blinded by network traffic encryption. This is also becoming more and more common due to privacy and security concerns. Some examples of historically used network visibility and security tools can be next-generation firewalls (NGFW), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), and network detection and response (NDR) systems. Businesses that choose the decryption route, particularly those in highly regulated industries, quickly learn that decryption at the level necessary for ongoing detection is problematic because exposed traffic may be observed or recorded. Not to mention the performance compromises and added overhead.
Also Read: The U.S. To Embrace New Restrictions On Utilizing Commercial Spyware
The Cloud Flow Logs Vary
Individual cloud service providers (CSPs) can offer effective visibility mechanisms for their particular cloud environments. However, 89% of businesses claim to have a multi-cloud strategy. Different CSPs each have gaps in their capabilities and additional capabilities to offer, according to the Flexera 2022 State of the Cloud Report. Furthermore, because there aren’t many standards, each CSP provides a different range of data types, data collection methods, and levels of visibility. It takes specialized knowledge to comprehend those differences, which differences matter, and whether they are significant. It isn’t easy to see traffic moving toward, away from, between, or inside clouds because visibility is also categorized. It isn’t easy to find a way to combine various cloud flow logs and normalize the data so security teams can examine it with a single set of eyes and avoid switching between CSPs.
There Are Many Endpoints, But Not All of Them Can Support Agents
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) is the newest hot tool because it offers many benefits. However, customers and prospects report that their endpoint EDR coverage is between 60 and 70 percent, excluding network equipment like routers and switches. Numerous other devices that connect to their corporate network are either uncontrollable or don’t support agents.
Changing Methods for Network Security and Visibility
Security professionals need a different strategy that enables us to visualize network traffic at a higher level across the number and types of environments and devices in use today without having to capture and decrypt to close the gaps DEED environments, and conventional tools are creating. The keys, it turns out, are context and metadata. A passive and agentless method of network traffic visibility across multi-cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments is provided by metadata in the form of flow data, which includes every IP address and every device. IT teams can gather and store metadata with less compliance or regulatory concerns because it provides information about network traffic without containing sensitive or private data. Diverse teams will have one place to go and one common language to use when all that streaming metadata is brought into one platform, normalized, and enhanced in real time with open-source and organizational-specific context data.
Without needing specialized knowledge to make sense of various flow data, they can concentrate on what matters to them instead of having to store and query platforms for additional lookups that could take hours to produce results. Utilizing the data organizations already have and giving teams a single location for a unified view of all that data and one common language will help security teams evolve their approach to security. It will also get them where they need to be, allowing them to concentrate on the issues they want to solve. This “less is more” strategy enables security teams to adapt to protect their decentralized network.
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