Proactive Visibility: The Master Key to Security
Offensive security is all about finding the weak spots in your target’s environment and make your way in through the cracks. My experience taught me that these spots always exist – no exception. And time factor is actually a force multiplier from the attackers’ side, because even if at a certain point in time you cannot find the crack you can be rest assured that eventually it will pop up.
What qualifies as a crack? Almost everything. The most straightforward are of course unpatched apps and operating systems. The mass commoditization of exploit writing gives the ability to compromise even the hands of beginning hackers – and that’s’ without mentioning exploit kits you can purchase and launch to distribute ransomware of cryptominers.
And of course there are good old passwords – and I mean ‘old’ in the literal sense of the word. Apparently, there are still many many people who for some reason resent changing their passwords. Typically, it is also coupled with this password being their exclusive one to all apps, machines and resources.
Another related example is the installed software on the hosts. Sure, ideally as an attacker you don’t want to install any tool and operate solely in memory, but many organizations don’t bother or don’t succeed in monitoring software on their hosts. It’s rather easy to spot this type of culture once you’re inside and in that case you can deploy your tool and start celebrating.
I can really go on and on but I think the I made my point. Now let’s be fare here – the situation is inherently imbalanced. While the attacker needs one vulnerable host eth defender must secure all of them, and in many cases the security cracks appear not because people are negligent or careless but because their human and human makes mistakes – and that’s where technology steps in.
Imagine that you’d have immediate visibility into all entities and activities in your environment – vulnerable hosts, risky user accounts and installed software a click of a button away. Let’s takt it further and add also the ability to search for any entity that might pose a risk and even get alerted when such entity pops up – host, user account, running files or anything else.
When me and my peers have envisioned Cynet 360 together we put all our attacker knowledge to the task and dedicated special concern to all the cracks that we happily took advantage of when we were at the attackers’ side.
Now, Cynet offers its visibility capabilities for free for 14-days to any organization that wants to enhance and optimize its defenses - it’s really a no brainer. Take it, use it and see for yourself.
My belief is that enabling IT and security teams to gain effortless visibility into what puts their organization at risk would exponentially raise their resilience level even without deploying any active threat protection product in place.
And if I want to be really precise in my choice if words – it’s not a belief. It’s insight and knowledge of someone that has played intensively in both sides of the game.