Could You Respond Quickly Enough to a Cyberattack?

Let me ask you a question… if you were a hacker, how quickly would you take advantage of newly disclosed bugs and other vulnerabilities? I’d bet it would be pretty quick, and industry experts agree. According to these experts, there’s less and less time for security professionals to react to vulnerabilities and zero-day threats… and it continues to shrink.

So, the question remains, how prepared is your business to respond when these kinds of vulnerabilities are taken advantage of?

Unfortunately, Time May Not Be on Your Side

Let me ask you another question: how long do you think it takes a cybercriminal to start seeking out vulnerabilities once they’ve been disclosed? A week? A few days? Nope—more like 15 minutes. And, now that the tools that these attackers use are more sophisticated than they’ve ever been before, you might have very limited time to apply any patches to resolve a vulnerability on your systems.

For instance, a lot of high-profile attacks from last year followed this trend, like the Exchange Server Proxyshell and ProxyLogon threats, the zero-day flaws in SonicWall, the Log4Shell flaws, and ZoHo ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus.

Palo Alto Networks presented another example of how important it is to respond to any threats that agencies and organizations disclose in F5’s Big-IP software. Apparently, within the first 10 hours of the vulnerability being disclosed, there were about 2,500 scans for vulnerabilities conducted.

How Does a Cybercriminal Get In?

 There’s a variety of methodologies that a hacker can use to access your network:

• 37% utilize phishing attacks
• 31% take advantage of software vulnerabilities
• 9% use brute-force credential attacks
• 6% leverage previously compromised credentials
• 5% derive access from insider threats
• 5% practice social engineering
• 4% will abuse an otherwise trusted tool or relationship

So, What Can Be Done?

With less and less time available for you to implement patches, you need to establish systems so you are able to rapidly apply any fixes applicable to your mission-critical systems. This will also require a dedicated team to manage your IT and keep its protections patched and up-to-date. This should also be supplemented by the kinds of protections that make life more difficult for hackers—things like multi-factor authentication, remote monitoring, and unified threat management.

We’re Here to Help Ensure Your Systems are Secure

We are well aware that there’s only so much time to attend to your cybersecurity—even less when you find a critical system vulnerability present on your business network. That’s precisely why we work with our clients to keep their systems patched. Partnering with us, you can be confident that your systems are protected under our watchful eye.

Find out more about how our services can help protect your business’ IT (and, by extension, its future) by calling (202) 640-2737.