Globalization causes evolution to the world, bringing it to its current state today. In today’s context, organisations and businesses is heavily dependent on information technology. It is necessary for them to protect their critical assets, in this case, information. These information addresses areas such as finance, research, development and etc. If such information were to be leaked and fall into the wrong hands, businesses and organisations will be vulnerable to many dangerous factors such as security weaknesses, flaws in business processes and etc.
What should they do?
Vulnerability assessments can come into play for businesses to scan networks for weaknesses or exploitable loopholes. This will assess the entire network, communication infrastructure and end systems. The identified vulnerabilities are used by the attackers to perform further exploitation on that target network.
Vulnerability assessment plays a major role in providing security to any organization’s resources and infrastructure from various threats. This includes both internal and external factors. To secure a network, an administrator needs to perform various steps such as:
- Patch Management
- Ensure no misconfigurations
- Troubleshooting
- Solving known issues
- Gather information and analyse security trends, threats and attacks
Why is vulnerability research important?
Every network administrator need to be up-to-date with the most recently discovered vulnerabilities and exploits in order to stay one-step ahead of attackers. For example, being informed abut new products and technologies , checking underground hacking websites, or new innovations and improvements made to existing products can help network administrators keep up to date. They will have to discover system design faults and weakness earlier, because attackers can exploit that loophole. Some might argue that this is too ideal of a situation to be feasible, but it is definitely a target that organisations should work towards to.
Third party companies like us do provide consultation and vulnerability assessments on how businesses can enhance their security to prevent indirect costs to be incurred to the company. Hence, with a cybersecurity specialist coupled with knowledge with a network administrator with a holistic view from end-to-end of the organisation network, they can minimise risk for the organisation.
Responsibilities in cyber defence?
It shouldn’t only be the IT team’s responsibility to ensure all systems and applications across the company are functioning securely. Board-level executives should be attending any discussion around implementing proactive prevention of cyber security vulnerabilities, and treating them as a top business priority.
Security strategies are often considered a large investment with little measurable return. In reality, the actual cost of downtime, repairs and damaged reputation can be catastrophic to a business. All business owners should be looking to ensure that they mitigate the risk of all of these costly failures by being proactive rather than purely reactive with their cyber security strategy.
Hence, concluding that it is a necessity where every process, stakeholder and asset plays a part in a holistic defence, it does not mean that it is impregnable.
Psychological Factor
We, humans can never maintain our consciousness at its maximum level. One might easily agree that the sources of one’s thoughts are hidden from view—we just don’t know where our ideas come from. But once we have them and we know it, that’s where consciousness begins.
You can read more about the psychology of the human mind here : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/there-is-no-such-thing-as-conscious-thought/
Thus, this shows that as users, specialists or even system engineers in the field of cybersecurity, we can never uphold the 100% vigilance as we can be distracted by events that happen in our lives.
What can we do?
We can only build a robust cyber security defense, rather than an impregnable one.
Here are the steps we need to take to build a robust defense:
- Keeping your employees up-to-date with modern technologies and help them grow their security awareness.
- Be aggressive in mitigating risks and preventing unauthorized access
- Implementing a disaster recovery plan
- Consider a third-party service provider in terms of securing your organisation.
Managed service providers are well-placed to deliver the right cyber security solutions for businesses to minimise risk and downtime, since they have so much focus on their own platforms, networks and performance. Your hosting provider should back-up the promise of 100 percent uptime and go beyond expected standards to ensure your business is ‘always-on’.
Quadrant360
We are providing MSSP services to organisations who seek to protect their assets in this virtual space. We provides IT and security professionals with Firewall Services and Vulnerability Services which lowers overall costs by strengthening your information security.
In conclusion, if businesses are equipped with the understanding of your business requirements and the technologies and solutions available to you, learning how to implement this efficiently, easily and without delay is the final step to consider.