Why a Secure Network Monitoring Solution is crucial to your IT Estate
Digitization has transformed our world. Every organization wanting to deliver the services that customers and employees demand must protect its network. Any software you use to run your business needs to have a sufficient layer of security. Whether your IT staff builds it or whether you buy it, the application could contain holes, or vulnerabilities, that attackers can exploit to infiltrate your environment or your network.
On Sunday, December 13, 2020 the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency confirmed that several agencies of the US Government and other Enterprise companies were exposed to a major hack, where data and tools were stolen. According to the Associated Press nation-state sponsored hackers were responsible; the attacks were orchestrated via malware on a widely used network monitoring solution. In response to the large-scale penetration of the US Government the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity division issued an emergency directive calling on all federal civilian agencies to scour their networks for compromises. The supply chain attack involved the insertion of malicious code into a widely used network monitoring system giving attackers a foothold in the network gaining access to data. The initial backdoor seems to have been distributed via an automatic update. Because this was a supply chain attack, businesses should be reviewing a wide range of the tools and processes, which form multiple aspects of their operations.
How has this affected IT and Operations departments?
Monitoring tools and automation are essential to managing IT estates and with the impact of COVID over the past month's automation is becoming ever more important. However, with increased automation comes the necessity of increased security. While there is no such thing as the new normal when it comes to security, businesses can be sure that increasing protection for the network and the tools that support the network will be a priority in 2021 and beyond. More companies have been moving towards a “Zero Trust” policy which gives IT the ability to monitor applications and enforce specific access policies based on their device, role and more. Support applications should be built on security best practices to make sure organizations are protected and not exposed to major breaches. The task of making applications secure never ends.
What has ITRS done to make sure our customers are secure from cyber-attacks?
The supply chain for ITRS software production is protected by multiple independent layers of intrusion and anomaly detection stacks, which are augmented by AI-powered networks, machine-learning algorithms, as well as human-supervised security systems. Our production estate and its supporting supply chain are a segregated environment and governed based on ISO27991 standards. ITRS maintains the end-to-end ownership of its supply chain, production as well as upgrade/update processes for its product suite, which means no one apart from our own experts with specific knowledge can perform maintenance tasks. ITRS stands behind our solutions and are ready to help with any monitoring needs or questions you may have.