Have you ever had that sense of dread when you hear a knock on your door? I happened to be reading Verizon’s 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report and it made me think of how sometimes unwanted visitors knock…and even get in.
In their report, Verizon asked, “Who’s behind the breaches”? Maybe not surprising, but 75% of all breaches are perpetrated by outsiders. The other interesting statistics noted in this area of the report was that 51% of these breaches involved organized criminal groups.
How are these unwanted visitors getting in? Security Metrics posted an interesting blog that identified some key stats that shed some light on this area.
• 45% of organizations were breached through remote access
• 73% of all investigated breaches had not implemented Logging and Log Monitoring
A third statistic that was a bit staggering from the Security Metrics post was that the “average organization was vulnerable for 1,549 days” and that “Cardholder data was exfiltrated for an average of 264 day”. With these types of levels of vulnerability and with the number of breaches up significantly as was noted in our blog post “Seriously, What Are My Odds of a Data Breach?” , it really brings home the need for a “Security First” focus.
A key step in keeping away unwanted visitors is to ensure you are not an easy target. There are a number of great articles on best practices for Securing a Remote Access Application. If you are interested, in the 9 key steps recommended by Trustwave you can click here.
One immediate step you can take is to leverage the Remote Access Security capability within Wind River’s Advanced Security Package. This capability is one of the 13 tools that is part of ASP and is a service that checks your computers for common software used for remote access. The Remote Access Security tool produces alerts when remote access software has been identified so you can review and confirmed that it is authorized and secure.
For Wind River customers, ASP replaced our prior PCI program and all its capabilities are available to you. Because of our approach in packaging these capabilities for many customers, we are able to save you money compared to going and buying these tools yourself.
If you have not already taken advantage of it, you can get started by visiting our ASP landing page or contacting your Relationship Manager. We want to help you take this step in your Security First approach, helping you detect and keep away unwanted visitors.
