Blog / Cyber Attackers Will Mine Your Network Vulnerabilities – However, if You Manage to Fix These First, They Will Not Be Able to Exploit Them.
There’s a service you can acquire from TRINUS, by which we perform an overall Security Assessment of your network. I’ve mentioned this before: our Cyber Security Assessment. It looks at a lot of things: from your business policies and procedures, to the physical layout of your equipment, and ending with your network itself.
Part of the electronic portion of an assessment is called a Vulnerability Scan. Simply put, it’s a piece of software that scans your network and looks for known vulnerabilities.
By ‘known vulnerabilities’ I mean ones that have already been discovered and catalogued. Now then, not every vulnerability is something to panic over. Some might allow an attacker to do something basic, like crash a program. Others could have limitations, like they only work if the person doing it has physical access to the computers. The worse ones are those that can be done remotely and don’t require any sort of User Authentication.
There are so many different types of vulnerabilities which exist within all sorts of software, that it’s impossible to keep track of them all.
That’s why Vulnerability scanners exist.
TRINUS does a scan like that, as part of a Security Audit. The idea is that the organization will look at the recommendations and act on them. The truth is that any reasonably-sized outfit should have a Vulnerability scanner and use it to routinely scan its’ own networks. The sudden rise of remote workers using personal computers to connect to corporate networks makes this even more critical. These personal devices are in direct control of your IT staff, which means that your ability to ensure that proper protections and software are in place and working on those machines is limited.
Setting up this sort of scanning does not require lots of computing power or storage space, so it can be easily installed on a desktop computer. Looking for and fixing vulnerabilities helps strengthen your organization’s protections against Cyber Attacks. Most of the time, correcting issues that are detected is easy and can be accomplished by installing a patch or doing some reconfiguration. The scans will detect vulnerabilities you weren’t aware of and probably ones that you never even considered.
It’s pretty simple to have a system where every month or so the Vulnerability software runs a scan and then emails it to your IT staff. They then look it over, install patches that may be missing, and consider re-configuring to improve your Security. There are also systems that actively monitor your network. These look for new devices all the time, so within a few minutes of plugging in a new gadget, you get a report about the detected vulnerabilities.
Having good Security means you need to take a pro-active approach, rather than a reactive one. Reacting to and fixing the problems that get pointed out to you is good. However, for that to work, it means you assume that anyone who finds a vulnerability or loophole won’t exploit it. You also presume they will tell you about it in the first place. These are two very risky assumptions to make. Thus, that means you need to be actively trying to find issues in your own Security and repairing them. Regular scans of your network are a part of that.
If you have questions about setting up Vulnerability Scans, please reach out to your TRINUS Account Manager for some stress-free IT.
By Kind Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyber-Man.
