Protecting your IT infrastructure is becoming an increasingly important topic. Ensuring your systems don’t become infected will keep customer data safe. It also prevents them from becoming a gateway for attacks on other systems, or from being misused in botnets.
Effective vulnerability management is essential, with, as its main component, software solutions that automatically scan for vulnerabilities:
- Automatically monitors activity in the background
- Regularly scans the network for new vulnerabilities
- Performs individual checks to ensure measures were successful
- Reviews policies (e.g. scanning to verify compliance with official security guidelines)
Vulnerability scanners first identify the systems they need to scan, as well as their operating systems, services and components. They also check all systems and services using routines that are updated to meet the latest security warnings. The results are then summarised in a report.
Precise action should be taken as soon as risks are identified. Severity levels indicate which vulnerabilities and counter-measures to prioritise, aided by an incident risk evaluation.
Patches are no substitute for vulnerability management.
In many environments, system-related dependencies prevent up-to-date patches from being installed as they may adversely impact an application’s functionality.
Vulnerabilities can also be caused by faulty configurations. Classic examples of this are weak admin passwords or file systems being inadvertently accessible over the internet.
And not every vulnerability has a corresponding patch. That’s why it’s essential to use specific solutions to safeguard systems.
The advantages at a glance.
- Scheduled checks
- Automatically updated check routines
- Security scanning of entire networks
- Use of custom policy criteria
- Help with inventories
- Alerts issued when policy violations or vulnerabilities are detected
- Scan results collected and analysed
Want to find out more? Schedule an appointment with your Bechtle IT security expert.
