Find Your Security Vulnerability Before Hackers Find It For You

 Every Network Has a Security Vulnerability — Where is Yours?

One of the top questions on the minds of network security personnel is "how do I reduce my security risk?" Even for smaller organizations, this is important because every network has a weakness. But do you know where you are the most vulnerable? Wouldn't you like to fix the problem now, before a hacker exploits it?

Here is a three-point plan that works to expose intrusions and decrease network security risk:

1. Reduce as many vulnerabilities within the network as possible

2. Find and quickly remediate intrusions that are discovered in the network

3. Periodically test your defenses to make sure they are actually detecting and blocking threats

Network Security — It All Starts With Prevention

Inline security solutions are a high impact technique that businesses can deploy to address security threats. These solutions can eliminate 90% or more of incoming security threats before they even enter your network. While an inline security architecture will not create a foolproof defense against all incoming threats, it provides the crucial data access that security operations (SecOps) teams need to make the real-world security threat load manageable.

It is important to note that an inline security solution is more than just adding a security appliance, like an intrusion prevention system (IPS) or a web application firewall (WAF). The solution requires external bypass switches and network packet brokers (NPBs) to access and deliver complete data visibility. This allows for the examination of ALL data for suspect network traffic.

Hunt Down Intrusions

While inline security solutions are absolutely necessary to lowering your risk for a security intrusion, the truth is that something bad will make it into your network for whatever reason. This is why you need a second level of defense that helps you actively search for threats. To accomplish this task, you need complete visibility into all segments of your network.

At the same time, not all visibility equipment is created equal. For instance, are your security tools seeing everything they need to? You could be missing more than 60% of your security threats and not even know it. This is because some of the vendors that make visibility equipment (like NPBs) drop data packets (without alerting you) before the data reaches critical security tools, like an intrusion detection system (IDS). This missing data contributes significantly to the success of security threats.

Keysight Technologies has the solution to this problem. Our taps, bypass switches and NPBs provide the visibility and confidence you need that you are seeing EVERYTHING in your network - every bit, byte and packet. Once you have this level of visibility, threat hunting tools and security information and event management (SIEM) systems can proactively look for indicators of compromise (IOC).

Stay Vigilant and Constantly Validate Your Security Architecture

The third level of defense is to periodically validate that your security architecture is working as designed. This means using a breach and attack simulation (BAS) solution to safely check your defenses against real-world threats. Routine patch maintenance and annual penetration testing are good security techniques; but they don't replace weekly or monthly BAS-type functions. For instance, maybe a patch wasn't applied (or applied incorrectly) and penetration tests are only good for a specific point in time. Once a few weeks or months have passed, new weaknesses will probably exist. And crucially, were the right fixes applied if a vulnerability was found? For these reasons and more, you need to use a BAS solution to determine the current strength of your defenses.

To learn more about how you can find problems before they (the hackers) do, visit this website Find IT Before They Do.

It Doesn't Take a Brain Surgeon

 

For many of us, college is that season of life when we are compelled to choose a career path, long before we have any idea of who we are or what we want. Back in my college days, many of my fellow students were the progeny of doctors, lawyers and engineers who saw no other viable option than to follow in the footsteps of their parents. Others who had a propensity to argue chose to pursue the law, while those geeky types who were always taking things apart as kids went into engineering. And those rare students with a 5.0 GPA (how is that even possible?) and whose faces were always buried in a book? They were destined for Med School.

Regardless of our initial choices, or of how many times we may have changed course along the way, most of us realized at some point that the scale with which Academia measures “smart” is broken, and that success in any of life’s endeavors is built on the ability to think outside the book. Nevertheless, we persist in the belief that some professions are just inherently smarter than others.

Take brain surgeons for example. Considered by many to be the pinnacle of the medical profession, brain surgeons are often held up as the smartest of the smart. Believed to be the very first medical specialty, neurosurgery dates back to ancient times. Originally called “trepanation” , it involved any intentional cutting open of the skull by a recognized practitioner. History provides few clues as to how smart these early practitioners may have been. The first modern brain surgery in the U.S. is credited to Drs. Hirschfelder and Morse, who removed a patient’s brain tumor in 1886.

The use of the phrase “it’s not exactly brain surgery” isn’t found in print much until the mid-twentieth century, but it may have originated with the career of Dr. Harvey Cushing, a writer, polymath, and pioneering neurosurgeon. Dr. Cushing was known for being extremely smart, outspoken, medically daring, and enormously prolific in developing new neurosurgical procedures.

While brain surgery may be challenging, the science behind launching and guiding rockets is no walk in the park either. This fact was never more apparent than in the aftermath of WWII, when a group of German rocket scientists, led by Wernher von Braun, were brought to the U.S. When the Russians launched their Sputnik satellite in 1957, many Americans were able to see it passing overhead in the starlit night. Thus began a new sense of urgency for the space race. The belief that rocket scientists (at the time predominantly German) were tremendously smart was bolstered by the reputation of another smart German, Dr. Albert Einstein. Oddly enough, the popularization of the phrase “it’s not rocket science” is attributed to an American football coach, who was quoted in a 1985 article in the Doylestown Daily Intelligence - "Coaching football is not rocket science and it's not brain surgery. It's a game, nothing more."

Most of us have used these phrases at one time or another to describe what we viewed as a simple task. While there’s no good data on which is more common, there is the inevitable question of who is smarter, the neurosurgeon or the aerospace engineer. Perhaps there is another profession that eclipses them both in intelligence. Scientists at the University College London in England set out recently to find the answer.

Data for their study was obtained from the online Cognitron Great British Intelligence Test, which measures planning and reasoning, working memory, attention, and emotion processing. The results showed neurosurgeons to be significantly better at semantic problem solving, while aerospace engineers were superior at mental manipulation and attention. Compared with the general public, neurosurgeons had faster problem-solving speed, but slower memory recall speed.

Overall the cognitive signatures of aerospace engineers and neurosurgeons are very similar. The latter are exposed to Latin and Greek terms in medical school, and thus may have an edge in verbal analogies and rare word definitions. This might help with semantic problem solving. Aerospace engineers excel in attention and mental manipulation, both of which are explicitly taught in engineering school.

The conclusion was that it’s fine to say “it’s not brain surgery” for situations that don’t require rapid problem solving. If focus and mental gymnastics aren’t essential elements, perhaps “it’s not rocket science” might be appropriate. In the overall cognitive profile, neither of these two professions appears to be significantly ahead of the general population.

According to the researchers, future studies will be aimed at other specific professions, with the goal of finally identifying the one most deserving for the summit of smartness. The scientific methods utilized in this initial study should have no problem identifying a clear winner.

After all, it’s not Network Analysis.

Author Profile - Paul W. Smith - leader, educator, technologist, writer - has a lifelong interest in the countless ways that technology changes the course of our journey through life. In addition to being a regular contributor to NetworkDataPedia, he maintains the website Technology for the Journey and occasionally writes for Blogcritics. Paul has over 40 years of experience in research and advanced development for companies ranging from small startups to industry leaders. His other passion is teaching - he is a former Adjunct Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. Paul holds a doctorate in Applied Mechanics from the California Institute of Technology, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.