Cybersecurity Awareness Month Spotlight: Outpace Attackers with Cyber Resilient Network Infrastructure
October 2, 2024
Welcome to Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a time when the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) and the National Cybersecurity Alliance partner on a campaign to remind everyone of various ways to protect themselves from online threats. This October, we at BackBox want to focus on the importance of software updates to protect your organization from threats that take advantage of vulnerabilities in your network devices – including firewalls, routers, and switches.
The world depends on networks, so network devices need to be up and running, even in the face of attacks that threaten downtime. But the challenge for network engineers to keep network devices resilient is mounting. Vulnerabilities are being exploited faster than ever because threat actors are using AI to help them discover the latest exploits. The odds of an attacker infiltrating your network by exploiting a vulnerability are increasing and the consequences can be painful. Ransomware is a top-of-mind example.
Threat actors take advantage of vulnerabilities, including software vulnerabilities in network devices, to infect a victim’s system and launch ransomware attacks – and their success rates are on the rise. In 2023, ransomware incidents increased by 73% and payments exceeded $1 billion for the first time. And this doesn’t include remediation costs and productivity and revenue losses caused by the disruption.
In 2023, ransomware
increased by
%
And payments exceeded
$1
Billion
Cybersecurity technology that only scans for vulnerabilities and tells you about your risk posture or threats is not enough. It’s also impossible to keep up when you rely on manual methods and wait until regularly scheduled monthly or quarterly maintenance windows to update devices.
You need cyber resilience, not just scanning and manual methods, to stay ahead of today’s threats.
Getting a Handle on Vulnerabilities with Automation
Vulnerability management and remediation is a key component to cyber resilience. And when you automate it, you can address network device vulnerabilities that are relevant to your organization faster and know that your business can keep moving forward.
The BackBox cyber resilience platform helps you outpace attackers in these three ways and keep your business up and running.
1. Understand the threat: Our cyber resilience platform learns about your inventory of network devices – including the device manufacturer, the device type, the device version, and the firmware version – and dynamically maps it to an enriched feed of CVE and vulnerability metadata. Network security engineers can quickly understand which active exploits they are vulnerable to.
2. Prioritize action: Not all vulnerabilities present the same level of risk. So, it’s important to prioritize which vulnerabilities you address based on context, including the criticality of their role within your operations. BackBox allows you to focus your resources on patching vulnerabilities that pose genuine risks.
3. Remediate: Our automated approach to cyber resilience doesn’t just pinpoint problems, it also fixes them. BackBox gives you the option to automatically remediate the vulnerability which can mean either updating the device software or making a configuration change that limits susceptibility. And it even notifies you if an update failed so you can investigate.
Raising cybersecurity awareness for network engineers means raising awareness for cyber resilience for network devices. Network devices that are cyber resilient are in a known and trusted state — all the time.
Rekha Shenoy
Automated vulnerability management and remediation puts a process in place that allows you to keep your network devices up to date all the time without overburdening the network engineering team. Given the pain disruptions such as ransomware inflict, it’s one of the most important things network engineers can do right now to protect their organization from online threats.
