Attackers continuously scan the Internet for vulnerable systems to compromise, and ignoring this fact can pose a serious risk to your business. For this reason, one of the best ways to prevent digital breaches is to accurately know our systems, and ensure that they are not affected by any vulnerability. But how often should we scan our systems?
Depending on the needs of the company and the characteristics of the asset to be reviewed, there are different approaches:
One possibility is to scan the systems every time they undergo a change, a policy that many large companies have implemented. Every day the systems are more dynamic, so there are systems that can be affected by multiple changes per day. With so many changes generated by multiple developers working in parallel, the chances of a human error generating a security breach increase significantly. In this scenario, Security in DevOps methodologies propose the integration of scanning tools that verify the code before each deployment. Our Security in DevOps service may interest you if you are in this situation.
On the other hand, it is important to be aware that dozens of new vulnerabilities are found every day. Even if your systems are not so dynamic, if you limit yourself to performing a scan once a year, every month you will be overlooking thousands of new vulnerabilities that could be affecting you. Some of the latest reports published mention that attackers are taking an average of 12 days to start launching their automatic attacks after a new vulnerability is discovered. This means that if your systems accessible from the Internet are not being reviewed and vulnerabilities corrected within a maximum of 30 days, you are beginning to assume significant security risks. Our Continuous Offensive Security services are prepared to scan your systems as many times as your business needs.
We must also take into account one of the most important elements for risk management in any company: regulatory compliance. More and more companies are incorporating this requirement as part of their internal policies, and in addition, these practices become security requirements of national and international regulations. For example, we can read Article 10 of the National Security Scheme.
- Finally, every so often a vulnerability is discovered that takes on special relevance, usually due to a combination of the number of systems affected, the severity of the security flaw, and the ease with which it is possible to attack. In these cases, our company will never be able to wait until the end of the month for “touch” to perform scans, and we must proactively launch scans to quickly detect if we are affected by these new threats.
Our Continuous Offensive Security services are prepared so that you can scan your systems as many times as your business needs, and they are always kept up to date to respond to the compliance needs of your organization, and to the emerging threats that may appear.