In a recently released Cybersecurity Advisory, the National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) highlighted the most common cybersecurity misconfigurations in large organizations identified through blue team and red team assessments. The advisory stated that these misconfigurations illustrate systemic weakness in many large organizations, including those with mature cyber postures.
The advisory called on both organizations and software developers to take actions that will prevent malicious actors from taking advantage of these vulnerabilities. Organizations are advised to take steps such as:
- Removing default credentials and hardening configurations.
- Disabling unused services and implementing access controls.
- Updating regularly and automating and prioritizing patching of known exploited vulnerabilities.
- Reducing, restricting, auditing, and monitoring administrative accounts and privileges.
While the guidance is straightforward, compliance is not. The complexity of modern enterprises makes implementing the recommendations extremely difficult to achieve. Networks are constantly being updated, configurations are being changed, and new equipment and software are being added by teams of engineers. For most organizations, there is not a single source of truth covering network topology, configuration, and behavior. Without a single source of truth, determining what needs to happen to embrace the guidance from CISA and NSA is virtually impossible.
The Forward Networks digital twin creates a mathematical model of the network covering the configuration, connectivity, and behavior of every device, making it possible to search the network like a database and set policy checks that ensure compliance.
Forward Networks can prevent 5 of the 10 common misconfigurations identified by CISA and NSA:
- Default configurations of software and applications
- Improper separation of user/administrator privilege
- Insufficient internal network monitoring
- Lack of network segmentation
- Poor patch management
- Bypass of system access controls
- Weak or misconfigured multifactor authentication (MFA) methods
- Insufficient access control lists (ACLs) on network shares and services
- Poor credential hygiene
- Unrestricted code execution
For more information on how the platform helps engineers prevent these misconfigurations, please read our solution guide.
Trying to convince SecOps teams they need more data is like trying to convince a drowning person they need more water. SecOps teams are so overwhelmed they can’t even respond to 67% of the alerts they receive. On average, SecOps teams receive 4,484 alerts per day and spend over three hours per day manually triaging the alerts, costing $3.3 billion annually in the US alone. (Source: Vectra 2023 State of Threat Detection)
The problem is that the high-volume of data they are receiving lacks context. When you receive over 20,000 CVE announcements and over 1.5 million alerts, you do not need more data; what you need is actionable, timely data that provides context and a path for remediation.
Forward Enterprise is integrated with the NIST database and endpoint scanning solutions, Rapid7 and Tenable. This integration provides security teams a prioritized remediation report of the vulnerabilities that exist in their network ranked by exposure.
Join our co-founder, Nikhil Handigol on Thursday, August 24th at 2:00 p.m. EDT/11:00 a.m. PDT to see this in action.
During a live technical session, Nikhil will demonstrate our Tenable integration and highlight how the solution delivers complete attack surface visibility, empowering SecOps to proactively identify impacted hosts with critical vulnerabilities accessible from the Internet or other critical exposure points in seconds.
You’ll see how the integration with Tenable delivers an actionable exposed host report that incudes:
- IPs
- Vulnerable services
- Risk score assigned by the vulnerability scanner
- Number of critical vulnerabilities
- Reachable services from the exposure point, including Layer 4 and Layer 7 details
- Blast radius analysis for this host
Most importantly, Nikhil will demonstrate how a mathematical model of the network helps make the plethora of network vulnerability data actionable.
Register for your seat now. [If you miss the live session, it will be immediately available on-demand via that same link.]
TLDR: Join our BrightTALK Webinar on March 16, 2023, 10:30 a.m. PST.
Headlines have been dominated by news of tech layoffs with the technology sector hit the hardest. There is a consensus that an economic contraction is on the horizon. An astute leader prepares for this possibility, no matter how well their company is doing.
For those who have been through this before, we know that while resources will be flat or reduced, service expectations will remain the same or intensify. IT is the lifeline of the business. Leaders are already losing sleep over preventing outages and keeping the network secure, and now they are facing the daunting possibility of having to do more with less.
In most instances, there isn’t a single solution. People need retraining, priorities must be shifted, and some projects may need to be abandoned. However, this potential contraction is different for IT shops because a game-changing technology is now available that will help NetOps, SecOps, and Cloud Teams save immense amounts of time and money.
Digital Twin technology creates a single source of truth for the network. The Forward Networks digital twin is the only platform on the market based on a mathematical model capable of scaling to support global enterprises with tens of thousands of devices.
By creating a digital index of the network and parsing and analyzing the data, Forward Enterprise makes asking questions of your network as easy as making a search engine query. The data is presented in a vendor-agnostic manner, empowering early career engineers to quickly diagnose issues and route them to the appropriate team for resolution with detailed information. As a result, customers report outage reductions of 90% and a reduction of MTTR from a mean of 4 days to <5 minutes.
This vital topic deserves thoughtful discussion, so we invited Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester, to join us for a live discussion on BrightTALK. We are looking forward to your questions. Andre will give his perspective on the top three things IT shops should be doing to prepare and how to use digital twin technology for the most impact.
When: March 16, 2023, 10:30 a.m. PST
Where: BrightTALK
REGISTER HERE
