The Heartbleed vulnerability scare earlier this year, which put a host of personal information - such as passwords, credit card information and e-mails - at risk, is just the latest in a long line of vulnerabilities exploited by cyber criminals. While the fear engendered by such vulnerabilities is logical, the answer to this threat is equally so. Organisations simply need to make scanning for vulnerabilities a priority.
According to Maxtec, a South African IT services provider specialising in security, storage and networking solutions, scanning regularly protects businesses against the threats posed by exploitable vulnerabilities.
As the sole South African distributor of the Tenable range of security solutions, Maxtec says Tenable's Nessus Enterprise solution is ideal for detecting vulnerabilities, eliminating threats and ensuring compliance across systems, applications and infrastructure.
"The beauty of Nessus is that it features high-speed asset discovery, patch and configuration auditing, asset profiling, sensitive data discovery, patch management integration, multi-scanner control and vulnerability analysis. More critically, it also offers the world's largest continuously updated library of vulnerability and configuration checks," says Tenable director Gavin Millard.
"Moreover, it is designed with sprawling companies and multinational entities in mind, in that any number of Nessus vulnerability scanners can be deployed within an organisation. Nessus Enterprise enables the control of multiple scanners, making it easy to extend scanner coverage over complex networks, cloud deployments and geographically distributed locations."
He explains that no matter how geographically spread an organisation is, Nessus Enterprise ensures results from vulnerability scans are stored in a central location for sharing. In other words, administrators are easily able to engage the rest of their organisation in the vulnerability management process. They are, he adds, also able to delegate access to the vulnerability scanners' resources.
"The idea behind the centralised location for sharing data around vulnerabilities is that it helps to break down borders. Regardless of whether it is an administrator in the London, Johannesburg or Beijing offices wanting to know about the vulnerabilities, it is a simple matter of logging onto the centralised control. This approach of sharing data enables organisations to operationalise vulnerability management. This is achieved by sharing the load of patching and updating systems that are easily exploitable, passing the appropriate reports over to the system owner or IT director," he states.
"Equally vital is the fact that Nessus Enterprise has the ability to integrate into the major mobile management platforms, providing companies with the opportunity to scan for and keep track of potential vulnerabilities in this arena too. It assists the business to immediately identify what devices are registered on the system and who owns these, enabling potential vulnerabilities to be addressed very rapidly."
Millard adds that another potential security risk today is that created by the cloud. He suggests that because it is so easy to move into the cloud today, many businesses forget the security headache that comes with this.
"There is no doubt the cloud has become a disruptive technology for many organisations, as they used to have the predictability of their information residing in a data centre, but with the cloud it can reside anywhere. For this reason, we have developed a version of our scanner that is pre-authorised to scan Amazon AWS instances for weaknesses, thus removing this headache.
"It seems as though there is a new breach that makes headlines every week, so there is really no excuse for businesses to fall victim to such vulnerabilities. They should already understand the critical importance of shoring up potential entry paths for attackers, by finding and eliminating vulnerabilities. What Tenable is doing is making this process easier than ever. Nessus Enterprise enables organisations to expand their ability to leverage a vast amount of up-to-date vulnerability data and remediate before attackers can exploit them," he concludes.
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