SAN JOSE, Calif., Feb. 07, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Skybox Security, a global leader in cybersecurity management, announced today the release of its inaugural Vulnerability and Threat Trends Report, which analyzes vulnerabilities, exploits and threats in play in 2017. The report, compiled by the team of research analysts at the Skybox Research Lab, aims to help organizations align their security strategy with the reality of the current threat landscape.
A trend observed for the last several years has seen threat actors turn cybercrime into a moneymaking machine. An integral part of this approach means taking the path of least resistance: leveraging existing attack tools rather than developing new ones, using the same attack on as many victims as possible and targeting lowhanging fruit. Findings of the report shed light on how those fruits have changed to include the assets that are generally more difficult to patch.
During 2017, the vast majority of exploits affected serverside applications (76 percent), up 17 points since 2016. Skybox Security Chief Technology Officer Ron Davidson points out that dealing with serverside vulnerabilities is always more difficult because the highervalue assets require more consideration than simply if there is a patch available or not. As more functions rely on servers than on clients, he explains, organizations need to have the means to understand these serverside vulnerabilities in context of the asset criticality, the surrounding topology and security controls, and the exploit activity in the wild. Only then can they accurately decide the optimal patching priority and schedule.
The increase in serverside exploits corresponds with the continued decline in the use of exploit kits relying on clientside vulnerabilities, which accounted for only a quarter of exploits in the wild that year. This is due in part to the demise of major exploit kit players like Angler, Neutrino and Nuclear, with no comparable frontrunner rising to replace them.
This does not mean, however, exploit kits are gone, said Marina Kidron, senior security analyst and group leader of the Skybox Research Lab. If theres one thing we know about cybercriminals, its that theyre constantly changing tactics, and so the next exploit kit giant is very likely in development as we speak. We also suspect that some kits have gone private, and are used exclusively by their developers in hopes of prolonging their viability.
Instances of newlypublished sample exploit code have also increased, with the monthly average jumping 60 percent in 2017. With minimal adjustments or none at all attackers can turn these samples into fully functioning exploits for their own use. This scenario was the case with the NSA EternalBlue exploit leaked by The Shadow Brokers and used in the WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, among others. Such leaks are putting advanced attack tools in the hands of lowerskilled cyberattackers, enhancing the capabilities of an already welloutfitted threat landscape.
Organizations need to stay up to speed with not only active exploits in the wild, said Kidron, but also factor in vulnerabilities with available exploit code to their prioritization processes. While the latter set doesnt represent an imminent threat, they can make the jump to active exploitation very quickly security teams need actionable intelligence attheready when they do.
The report also shows that in 2017 there was a 120percent increase in new vulnerabilities specific to operational technology (OT) compared to the previous year (OT includes monitoring and control devices common in critical infrastructure organizations such as energy producers, utilities and manufacturers, among others). This spike is particularly concerning as many organizations have poor or nonexistent visibility of the OT network, especially when it comes to vulnerabilities as active scanning is generally prohibited.
OT is too often in the dark, and that means security management isnt getting the full picture of cyber risk in their organization, said Kidron. Even when patchable vulnerabilities are identified, OT engineers are understandably hesitant to install the update, as it could disrupt services, cause equipment damage or even risk life and limb. Organizations with OT networks need to have strategies in place not just for OT vulnerability assessment and patching prioritization, but also to unify such processes with those in the IT network to truly understand and manage risk.
Overall, new vulnerabilities catalogued by MITREs National Vulnerability Database doubled in 2017. The jump was largely due to organizational improvements at MITRE and increased security research by vendors and thirdparties, including vendorsponsored bug bounty programs. The result is more than 14,000 newly assigned CVEs. Whatever the reason, it introduced yet more challenges to the teams responsible for managing vulnerabilities. In 2017, if you were still relying on traditional prioritization methods like CVSS scores only, your laundry list just got longer, said Davidson. In the year ahead, we may well see an even higher figure. Organizations have got to take a drastically different approach to vulnerability management.
Skybox recommends establishing a threatcentric vulnerability management (TCVM) program to adapt to these changes in the threat landscape and those yet to come. The TCVM approach helps security practitioners focus on the small subset of vulnerabilities most likely to be used in an attack by analyzing them from the interconnected perspectives of the business, network and threats in play.
To read the full report, click
here. To learn more about Skybox TCVM, visit
skyboxsecurity.com/tcvm.
About Skybox Research Lab
The Skybox Research Lab is team of security analysts who daily scour data from dozens of security feeds and sources as well as investigate sites in the dark web. The Research Lab validates and enhances data through automated as well as manual analysis, with analysts adding their knowledge of attack trends, cyber events and TTPs of todays attackers. Their ongoing investigations determine which vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild and used in distributed crimeware such as ransomware, malware, exploit kits and other attacks exploiting client and serverside vulnerabilities.
For more information on the methodology behind the Skybox Research Lab and to keep up with the latest vulnerability and threat intelligence, visit
www.vulnerabilitycenter.com.
About Skybox Security
Skybox provides the industrys broadest cybersecurity management platform, delivering comprehensive attack surface visibility. Skybox delivers the context needed to quickly identify and fix vulnerabilities and security weaknesses within large, complex networks including physical, virtual, multicloud and OT environments. The Skybox Security Suite integrates with more than 120 networking and security technologies to give insight on how to improve efficiency and effectiveness of vulnerability and threat management and firewall and security policy management.
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