The start of every cyberattack is reconnaissance where cybercriminals are studying the target IT environment and building an attack vector map. The attackers will always look at the easiest form of attack tactic. Most often than not, they succeed in using these tactics. It is recommended to use the best vulnerability management tool to avoid attacks.

In the diverse IT environment, IT security admins struggle to analyze the cluttered data and the organization’s IT environment deeply. Inadequate insights into the IT environment open the door for cybercriminals to enter through narrow lanes of your IT infrastructure. Also, IT security admins miss out on the important piece of the puzzle of cyber hygiene measures. These measures can be followed by using a patch management solution.

Ask these simple questions to validate that you have enough insights into your IT infrastructure:

• Do you understand your IT environment deeply enough to know what is in it and what is not?
• Is there unnecessary IT? Unwanted installations and configurations?
• Are there outlier systems, and outlier configurations?
• Are basic security controls deployed and functioning well?
• How are these systems interacting with each other?

SecPod SanerNow introduces a Continuous Posture Anomaly Management platform to discover risk exposures that are fundamental to the cyber-attack prevention journey to implement maximum protection.

What are Posture Anomalies?  

Posture Anomalies (PA) are outliers and deviations present in devices against known-good when the system’s security postures are evaluated collectively. The anomalies are either statistically determined, machine learning computed, or deviations derived out of security best practices.

Statistical anomalies: 

Organizations have 100s of systems in their IT environment. It is obvious that IT security teams become blindsided, not knowing if all the systems are configured a certain way and if all the systems are behaving a certain way.

Every security tool, like a vulnerability management tool, whether prevention or detection based, always looks at security from an individual system point of view. They never look at the entire IT system collectively as one entity and analyze the deviations.

In every organization, there will be commonalities across the devices, common security policies, common security controls, application policies, device control policies, common security products and protocols, and common behavioural traits. The problem is when IT security admins don’t have visibility to deviations against acceptable commonalities. These outliers will help us understand the IT infrastructure holistically and act against anomalies if they are exposed to a potential threat. 

Security control anomalies:  

It is important to ensure that only authorized or approved security controls and hygiene measures are implemented throughout the organization’s IT systems. Across all the systems, getting visibility to what is running on them, how the security controls are configured, and whether they are staying as they were configured is a critical need for ensuring an accepted baseline. Any deviations from the standard measures are to be marked as anomalies. Further, appropriate actions must be applied to remove the anomaly for safe and secure IT infrastructure.

Posture Anomalies: What to Look Out For?

SanerNow Continuous Posture Anomaly Management looks at 100s of device artifacts collectively across devices to uncover posture anomalies that are helpful to know and ensure particular cyber hygiene is maintained across all devices. It’ll identify devices that are configured so differently from others, with unique postures when compared to others. It’ll predict a potential risk that must be dealt with.