2021 could have ended quietly with the holidays, but that was without counting on Log4Shell, the biggest cybersecurity incident of the year. Classified as Remote Code Execution, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on machines using the Log4j2 library.
The potential impact is enormous and can lead to a total loss of data integrity and compromise the availability of the entire system.
To avoid burnout for security teams already heavily impacted since the start of the pandemic, ethical hackers got into gear and produced hundreds of reports in the first week to list potentially affected systems across the world. world.
For a bug like Log4Shell, a day, or even an hour, can make the difference in avoiding a data leak. Better to have the right resources on your side.
Endowed with specialized skills and reasoning close to that of real cybercriminals, ethical (or white hat) hackers are real modern-day bounty hunters, exploring computer systems in search of vulnerabilities.
Their mission: to report them responsibly so that they are corrected before they can be exploited for malicious purposes. Ethical hackers escalate information about security weaknesses to help organizations implement effective measures to prevent future attacks.
Fixing vulnerabilities is one of the main security tactics that ethical hackers practice on a daily basis.
From detection to remediation of vulnerabilities
Vulnerability management and remediation are critical issues in helping organizations reduce their attack surface. This process on security vulnerabilities within systems and software consists of detecting vulnerabilities through testing and analysis, prioritizing risks, remediating, blocking, applying a patch or removing components, and then putting in place a mechanism to continuous monitoring of new forms of emerging vulnerabilities.
Before being able to correct its vulnerabilities, it is therefore necessary to know how to detect them. But scanning systems in the traditional way is often not enough, increasing response time (MTTR) and leaving systems vulnerable longer than necessary.
Some corrective actions are taken as a result of penetration testing or vulnerability assessments. These tests produce reports on vulnerabilities and how to fix them.
The reports serve as a checklist for security teams to rank vulnerabilities in order of criticality, allowing critical vulnerabilities to be fixed first.
After developers deploy a fix, they can perform another scan or test to validate the fix. Re-testing is an essential part of patching vulnerabilities, as some patches can introduce new flaws.
How to fix vulnerabilities?
Automated scans help prioritize known vulnerabilities and generate reports to prioritize threats. The limit is that this scan does not go off the beaten track and does not detect all possible vulnerabilities.
It is therefore important to set up a systematic assessment of vulnerabilities. This type of assessment provides information to the security team to classify, prioritize, and close security vulnerabilities, including those that automated scans would have missed.
Many organizations use the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) to communicate vulnerability criticality and characteristics. The CVSS scoring system calculates a criticality score based on attack vector, complexity, and impact.
Among the most common vulnerabilities, hackers help trace unpatched operating systems, SQL injection flaws, weak credentials, Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), direct references to insecure objects ( IDOR) or incorrect device configurations.
Remediation times may vary depending on the impact of the vulnerabilities and the measures to be taken to correct them. Organizations should therefore plan remediation carefully, as patches may require downtime or have unexpected effects.
Competent players in preventive cybersecurity
The democratization of ethical hacking is a major asset for the remediation of vulnerabilities. Rather than depending solely on its own security team, a more offensive and consolidated approach that also relies on third-party talents available all over the world and can integrate on mainstream platforms such as Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub , GitLab, PagerDuty or ServiceNow makes it possible to manage security breaches more effectively, including the most critical ones.
This security model provides a fresh look at attack surfaces and helps resolve vulnerabilities faster and more efficiently.