Immunize your network from security threats, by eliminating their targets - Network Vulnerabilities

To succeed in today's marketplace, networks must be safe, open, and interconnected making it easy to exchange information with customers, suppliers and business partners around the globe. Without proper management, however, these same network efficiencies can pose serious security risks.

Present-day information security threats such as Internet Worms, Denial of Service attacks, viruses, and other intrusions are more sophisticated, frequent, and dangerous than ever before. Moreover, the dramatic increase in vulnerabilities discovered, along with the speed at which new threats are created make this challenge even steeper. Measuring and managing network risk is a significant challenge for companies of all sizes.

Additional defense solutions such as firewalls, antivirus software and intrusion detection systems are necessary layers of security, but are incapable of proactively detecting network vulnerabilities and cannot reliably prevent attacks. Today's attacks bypass these layers of protection and directly target network weaknesses.

Vulnerability management is a critical component of any security infrastructure because it enables proactive detection and remediation of security vulnerabilities. Security professionals that use vulnerability management tools are able to correct weaknesses before they are exploited and no longer rely solely on defensive security measures to protect themselves. According to the Yankee Group, frequent and thorough vulnerability management is a best practice every company should follow.

Vulnerability Management Lifecycle
The rate at which new security vulnerabilities are being discovered continues to increase and the time it takes to develop and share exploits for those vulnerabilities (in the form of manual exploits, worms, viruses and Trojans) continues to decrease. As a result, it is no longer sufficient for organizations to perform yearly or even quarterly network audits.

According to the Yankee Group's Best Security Practices, organizations should perform vulnerability management on a daily or weekly basis. Vulnerability management is a lifecycle process consisting of six steps:

Discover

• Discover all assets across the network, and identify host details including operating system and open services.
  

Prioritize Assets

• Manage your network by categorizing assets into groups or business units.
  
• Assign a business value to asset groups based on its criticality to your business operation.
  

Assess

• Determine a baseline risk profile so you can focus on eliminating risks based on asset criticality.
  
• Identify security vulnerabilities on a regular automated schedule.
  

Report

• Measure the level of business risk associated with your assets according to your security policies.
  
• Trend overall security posture over time.
  

Remediate

• Prioritize and fix vulnerabilities by business risk.
  

Verify

• Verify the elimination of threats through follow-up audits.

For more information about the QualysGuard Consultant Services we offer, Contact us today!