Ivanti’s recent Ransomware Spotlight Year End 2021 report presented alarming statistics concerning the number of unpatched vulnerabilities, calling it the root of more than half (56%) of successful ransomware.
“Businesses need to ensure they are staying on top of patching vulnerabilities, no matter how old or new they are, to mitigate falling foul to these vulnerabilities being weaponised,” says Srinivas Mukkamala, Senior Vice-President, Security Products, at Ivanti. Secondly, organisations need to stay on top of zero-day vulnerabilities.
With attackers leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities, even before the common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are added to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD) and patches are released, Mukkamala warns that security pros should look beyond the NVD and keep an eye out for vulnerability trends, vendor advisories and alerts from security agencies while prioritising the vulnerabilities to patch.
As with fraud, protecting your business IT environment requires companies to be fast-moving and reactive from the leaders down on. Building with security in mind means you can service both customers and employees better. Cyber security risks will only increase and cyber criminals will continue to grow more sophisticated – and it is no longer just a task for IT departments, instead it is a challenge that must be recognised as a problem for every employee, starting with chief executives.
Greg Strydom, Managing Director of Think Tank Software Solutions – a premier Ivanti partner based in South Africa with offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban – recently shared his top four essential strategies for fighting back against ransomware: “Cyber attacks are more likely to target businesses with small or medium IT infrastructure security maturity. It is easier and a much higher payoff to go after low-hanging fruit rather than try to work around systems with massive security investments. Think of it as a thief walking down the street and pulling on all the car handles – they are going to skip the locked ones first and look for the unlocked ones. Businesses of all sizes need to be pragmatic and realistic to know what to look out for – two-factor authorisation, enhanced security education for employees – but, most importantly, invest in software that discovers and inventories your technology.”
Think Tank Software Solutions deploys Ivanti Security Solutions to support South African businesses of various sizes in protecting their IT infrastructure investments. Ivanti Security Controls supports self-identifying and self-healing modules that provide business leaders with insight into their entire IT infrastructure. The solution also allows for an automated process to deploy software, which creates an efficient process for users to request updates or approvals through its portal. As user-targeted attacks represent a considerable portion of overall cyber security breaches, Ivanti Security Controls has the potential to significantly reduce a business’s exposure to risk without impacting the user experience.
Raaziq Gamieldien, Head of Professional Services at Think Tank Software Solutions, further reiterated: “By proactively protecting your business’s virtual environment, you can reduce risk across business functions and minimise the impact of a security breach – this is even more so for a business with a significant number of endpoints (kiosks, ATMs, pay-at-the-pump, fixed terminals, etc).”
He notes the South African businesses supported by Think Tank Software Solutions and powered by Ivanti are taking a risk-based management approach to deploying new security software.
To learn more about the value in having a strong cyber security strategy in place, click here.
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