Successful attack prevention and system maintenance

With the emergence of the WannaCry epidemic in May and Petya worm attack in June, importance of orderly maintenance of IT systems by timely installation of appropriate software patches has again been put into the spotlight. Applying software patches has been a much-debated topic for the last decade and a half, either from the viewpoint of burdening existing IT personnel or the extent to which it can harm business processes and applications within the organization. When taking into consideration old and so-called legacy applications, this may have been a subject for discussion. Today we should not even consider this as something to be debated nor should there be any exceptions when we have virtual patching technology (previously called (h)IPS) for updating real software patches.

Experiences of organizations affected by WannaCry and Petya ransomware in the shadow of the upcoming GDPR regulations, show the importance of implementing the process of testing and applying software patches. Realistically speaking, what is the actual cost of time that these organizations lost on recovery instead on doing business, processing data and avoiding system repair, as well as penalties that may be imposed?

One of the technologies that assist organizations with early detection of vulnerabilities related to security issues, malicious code, or potential unauthorized network access has been available on the market for at least two decades. You’ve guessed correctly, we are talking about the so-called Vulnerability Management Systems. Veracomp is the distributor of one such system – Tenable Network Security – including one of the more famous products for on-demand system scanning and vulnerability checking, Nessus Professional.

How can Tenable help with today’s challenges? The answer is pretty simple. For starters, Tenable has a plugin designed to detect MS17-010 vulnerabilities in all products to help you discover which computers or servers lack proper patches, and signals when it’s time to apply software or virtual patches:

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Potential malicious activity can be detected by using the malware scan option available in Tenable.io or SecurityCenter products:

… or by using YARA policies integrated with AV solutions that support it.

Taking all of the above into consideration, key information is that there exists a very simple way to detect potential security issues early – using the Nessus Professional on-demand scanning tool which supports an unlimited amount of IP addresses and generates adequate reports.

SecurityCenter and Tenable cloud products offer more than just on-demand scanning, but we have to start somewhere, right?

You can try Nessus Professional without any obligation for a period of 7 days and on 16 IP addresses by clicking this link.

Feel free to contact us for additional information on Tenable products!