As successful data breaches are carried out seemingly at will, it’s obvious we need to adapt our defences to match them.

“Know your enemy” is a common mantra among security professionals. The industry has quickly developed a great understanding of the well-funded, highly structured, targeted cyberattack. In contrast, our defences remain fragmented, both technically and operationally. Disorganization only makes an attack easier for the adversary to execute — and makes our jobs as defenders all the more difficult, time-consuming and inefficient.

As legacy perimeter and signature-based defences have proven to be fundamentally flawed, a sharper focus must be put on understanding exactly how our adversaries carry out attacks and designing equally structured response systems to disrupt their efforts.

While organizations have many models for structuring their IT security and operations teams, we find the best ones recognize the need to integrate these two groups. They structure them to provide both proactive and reactive security functions that map directly to the attack.

Proactive: Getting Ahead With Endpoint Protection

Why is a proactive security component so critical, and what exactly does a proactive strategy mean? Consider the following simple but devastating statistics:

The vast majority of attacks, 99 percent, exploit existing, known vulnerabilities.

About 90 percent of attacks leverage the same Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®), some of which have been known for years.

Based on these numbers, organizations could take some highly effective pre-emptive measures to make it more difficult for an attacker to gain a foothold in any given environment. By maintaining a continuous cycle of endpoint management and patching that constantly discovers, evaluates and removes vulnerabilities, overall risk can be drastically reduced. Couple this with a great end-point solution, the organisation has a strong security posture.

Security and IT operations teams should focus on the flaws attackers are actually utilizing. This is more effective than the overwhelming task of trying to eliminate every known vulnerability or focusing too heavily on sophisticated mechanisms that are rarely used. Furthermore the use of “good” end point protection tool, will immediately add a strong layer of protection.

SecureIPX helps clients get ahead with the use of innovative solutions that stay ahead of the curve hence helping customer stay secure.