The latest revelations about firewall vulnerabilities stolen and leaked by the Shadow Brokers are very scary, but not all that new. We learn about the release of a major infrastructure vulnerability about once every six months or so. Organizations that have learned to focus on resilience — knowing their network and how to operate through a threat — are in the best position to respond.
With each new revelation, every defender has to scramble to answer the same three basic questions: do I have this problem? Where? Is it exposed? In today’s situation with weaponized vulnerabilities in major firewalls, the first question is easy to answer (if unfortunate). It seems that almost every major network has instances of these vulnerable products as part of their security defenses. The second and third questions require mapping the vulnerability into your own network. Do you have wide open access, or, effective internal segmentation? For this disclosure, have you properly locked down the important protocol known as SNMP? Once you can answer these questions, you are ready to begin incident response based on any surprises you turn up.
Imagine you’re responsible for a physical building, and you put up doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only”. That’s an important thing to do. Whether you run a retail store, a corporate office, or a cruise ship, you need to keep some critical infrastructure and access in a special zone. Now imagine forgetting to put those signs on some of the doors, or worse, leaving them open – perhaps through simple oversight, rushing to build out your business, or as you adapt to changing times. And, the only way you could know if you have a problem is to walk through every single hallway to check. If you don’t know or can’t tell whether your restricted areas are solid, then incidents are much scarier. This is the issue behind the latest revelations. It’s an important industry-wide best practice to isolate important network management protocols in a special zone, similar to the “Authorized Personnel Only” part of many buildings. But organizations everywhere have to scramble to see whether they have done this properly in light of the new vulnerabilities in those protocols.
RedSeal users can see where they stand with just a few clicks.
To read more, including step by step instructions for using RedSeal to answer these critical questions, see here.
For a demonstration of how you can use RedSeal to understand the extent of the problem in your specific network, watch our video.
