There was a time when the thought of secure infrastructure would bring items like properly configured IDS/IPS, Firewalls, Switches and Routers with hefty ACLs and 802.1x to mind. However, after Covid and even a bit before the traditional walled layout of the business network design was starting to become outdated. Remote workers and BYOD meant that not everyone could shelter safely inside the castle walls (not that they were safe before). Now IT and Security teams now had a much bigger area to observe and protect. The task becomes harder; much, much harder, but not impossible. The tools change and how you deploy, monitor, and update these tools also change. Let’s look at how to expand the concept of secure infrastructure into the modern distributed workforce.

It is a common belief that vulnerability management is nothing more than scanning and patching. However, as we have seen in many breaches and attacks, this is far from true. Vulnerability management is about understanding your organization and the risks it faces. Risks that an organization faces can include insider threats, public exposure, data leakage, improper configurations or safeguards, data integrity models, and quite a bit more. It is not enough to simply scan with a specific flavor of vulnerability scanner, it is a much larger effort and requires buy-in from every team and person in an organization.

As the title implies, we will be talking about Cylance PROTECT (now wholly owned by Blackberry). Our focus will not be on the inner workings, or any type of vulnerability. Our focus today will be all about Protect’s script control function and why many people do not enable it. If this sounds like a fun read, then you might be one of those security admins that have beat your head against the wall figuring out just how to get this working right in your environment.

It seems that is the time once again to talk about the relationship between software vendors and the security posture of different business verticals. Why are we beating this particular dead horse? Well with the Covid-19 Pandemic, the rush to shift to remote work force and an increase in attacker activity aimed at the remote workforce and healthcare you would think that there would be an increase level of effort to fix vulnerabilities in remote access and healthcare services software. If you thought that, you would be wrong. Instead during this time, we are seeing more software vendors pushing FDA as law and healthcare organizations even refusing opportunities to patch critical software. This on top of an extremely slow response to threat to the remote workplace.