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28
October

Effective Patch Management Tools for Your Organization

October 28, 2022
In Company, Partners
By admin

Welcome back to the blog for our final Cyber Security Awareness Month blog! Today we are focusing on the importance of patching and remediation. This key security step can prevent the majority of breaches and save organizations from an unfortunate, and costly, attack. A study by Ponemon shows that over 60% of breaches are due to unpatched, known vulnerabilities and many of the victims were unaware that their organizations were vulnerable in the first place. Today’s blog will review what you can do to avoid this and how Secure Sense can help. 

Over half of the impacted organizations rely on manual patching processes that make it exceedingly difficult to keep up to date on patching cycles; meanwhile, the attack surface has exploded due to remote work scenarios and tens of thousands of CVEs are reported each year. Cyber threats are more prevalent than ever, preying on outdated operating systems and applications, and endpoints are increasingly difficult to patch and troubleshoot due to their mobility, being off-net to patching tools and overburdened staff not having the resources necessary to overcome those hurdles. Even with the right tools, staffing and expertise are a challenge for IT budgets, especially where patching needs are typically messy, require follow-up processes and operate on conflicting schedules for staff availability. So, what can you do?

The good news is there are many tools out there that are tailor made to manage your patching and alleviate the stress that comes from keeping your systems up-to-date constantly. You may ask “but does it work with remote working employees?” and the answer is yes. Secure Sense has partnered with Tanium to provide a SecurePATCHING managed service solution that maintains a console in the cloud so that it is accessible from anywhere to its agents or the console can be whitelisted to ensure the administrative interface is only accessible from within your company (or when on a corporate VPN, of course). This service allows your organization to patch whatever needs patching, whenever it needs patching, including servers, desktops, remote employee laptops, and more.

Our team of experts provides:

  • deployment services
  • ongoing asset discovery and management
  • patching module compilation and deployment
  • customization of patching workflows
  • technical support
  • exclusion management
  • all manner of reporting and visibility customization.

We work with your team to design a comprehensive patching plan that integrates with your change management and technical teams. In addition to scheduled and automated features of the service, our team is available for ad-hoc requests, emergency and zero-day patching response with criticality-based service levels.

The features of the service include:

  • 24×7 support and management of patching, support and reporting requests
  • Profiling, organization and management of assets
  • Asset patch-compliance tracking and remediation
  • Patch program design and tuning, including patch module compiling, scheduling, approval chains and notifications
  • Implementation of patch modules on a scheduled basis, validation and follow-ups of exceptions
  • Intelligent workflows for OS and Application patching
  • Ad-hoc, emergency and zero-day patching according to criticality-based SLAs
  • Endpoint software licensing monitoring, allowing for unused software to be identified and licenses reclaimed, saving you money
  • Tracking and metrics designed to inform service improvement over time, demonstrate risk reduction and ROI
  • Progress tracking, notifications of patching activity and regular status meetings

The benefits of SecurePATCHING with Secure Sense:

  • Centralization of patch management across diverse assets and environments
  • Cost efficiency of staffing for MSP vs. hiring full-time employees
  • Process efficiency of 24×7 processes vs. availability of your resources during business hours
  • Low Perimeter Network load of our solution means lower risk when patching in terms of productivity and technical risks from pushing broad scale patches over the network
  • Advanced tracking and compliance metrics and advanced visibility of how risk profiles change in real time
  • All the benefits of a seasoned, experienced team to guide your patching activities
  • Dedicated resources committed to your success in the form of your CSM and extended Customer Success Team!

Implementing the right tools to keep your systems safe and up-to-date lowers your organizations risk of attacks through unpatched systems and vulnerabilities. To learn more about Secure Sense’s SecurePATCHING service, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 866-999-7506 or shoot us an email at contactus@securesense.ca.

Your key word is ‘Patch Management’. Don’t forget to comment the key word on LinkedIn here for your chance to win one of many prizes! Prizes will be drawn next week so be sure to get your comments in.

Secure Sense is the security provider that cares. We are a team of experts with a passion for IT and protecting your organization is what motivates us daily. If you have questions or want to learn more about how we can improve your organization’s security, and our services or just want to chat about security please give us a shout. Follow along throughout the month of October as we discuss all things cybersecurity for Cyber Security Awareness Month.

You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook,  LinkedIn.

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A Secure Sense Competitive Advantage

Welcome back to the Cyber Security Month blog! In last week’s blog, we talked about the importance and value of an MSSP, what sets Secure Sense apart from other MSSP’s and how Secure Sense can help your business. Today, we want to continue the conversation around the competitive advantage of working with Secure Sense and what sets us apart in the world of managed security.

In addition to our dedicated customer success teams and our 24×7 SOC (read more in the previous blog here) Secure Sense’s white glove service stands out in many other ways. Continue reading to find out the secret keyphrase, and our competitive advantage.

Expert engineers/analysts

Our experienced technical team comes from diverse technical backgrounds, representing a wealth of security knowledge. They play an integral role in everything we do at Secure Sense; from evaluating partners to developing services, allowing us to focus entirely on the best products and the highest training certificates.

Our engineers, architects, and analysts are required to ensure they are up-to-date on technical training. In addition to solution technical training, our technical team has focused on training in the following areas:

  • Communication for clearer and more accurate ticket updates​
  • Troubleshooting skillsets have led to fewer escalations internally, and ultimately shorter times to remediate​
  • Critical analysis skills which have measurably improved our ticket responses in providing higher quality responses to tickets.

This training has had a measurable increase in the quality of our services, as well as time to remediate and reduce escalations.

Our SOC has many teams that work with our expert analysts to ensure you receive the most from your service. In addition to our security analyst team, Secure Sense has four other technical teams: the reporting team, the threat intel team, the automation team, and the purple team.​

Automation team:

The Secure Sense automation team reviews customer requests, as well as potential customer controls, and ties those controls in with our managed services for automated systems mitigation, stopping threats in their tracks.​

The team is also responsible for:

  • Automated SIEM log analysis, tied into our Threat intelligence team to streamline the ingestion of IOCs into our managed services.
  • Implementing our vendor vulnerability review and remediation systems allows us to reduce our critical vulnerability remediation windows and provide improved visibility into coverage and reporting.
  • Delivering smart-responses from our SIEM solution, and implementation of Reporting team recommendations and improvements.​
  • Automating reporting and alerting directly into our ServiceNOW portal, providing short response times to customer alerts

Reporting team:

Secure Sense has created a dedicated reporting team to streamline and bring more meaningful data to our customers on a regular basis. This team not only builds custom reports, but also analyzes how our customers are using our services, identifying any particular improvements that we could be making to the services, and providing recommendations to the rest of the managed service teams.​

Our reporting team also builds datasets and analyses based on our customer tickets, as well as managed service systems, to identify new use cases and patterns that we can leverage to improve services internally.​

Threat intel team:

Our internal Threat Intel team reviews various events that have occurred and identifies the relevant TTPs. They provide this intelligence to our purple team which will operationalize it.​

The Secure Sense threat intel team focuses on both systematic collection of IOCs and analysis thereof, as well as individual TTPs that are used to identify new and emerging threats. ​The team looks at those tools, Techniques and procedures that threats are using in the market, and identifies how they could be leveraged against our existing customer base, along with better enhancing our services to detect those TTPs when in use.​​

Purple team:​

Secure Sense’s Purple team reflects the blend of both defensive or blue team skillsets, along with offensive or red team skillsets. The team takes tools, techniques and procedures identified by the threat intel team, analyses our customer’s environments and identifies if we can detect them. ​ With customer collaboration, the Purple team can provide execution packages where we can simulate specific components of a threat, and then validate that we have visibility into that TTP being run in a customer environment.

Professional services

Secure Sense’s implementation and support experts are experienced in a wide variety of Professional Services engagements with specialized tactical teams within our extended technical bench, focused on specific technologies and or products.

In most cases, Professional Services are project-based services that require a skilled engineer or architect for a one-time project or short-term change in your organization; or a senior consultant to provide a wide range of risk advisory services. Project teams will also typically address any ongoing support or maintenance after the initial project is complete.

Our cybersecurity consultant team and senior architects hold a broad range of top industry certifications and credentials, along with many years of experience in the industry. Our methodologies for common engagement types have been developed and refined to reflect the most up-to-date best practices and to scale to projects of any size, including global enterprise enablement.

A few of the engagements we commonly offer include:

  • Cybersecurity Architecture Assessment and Design
  • Solution Implementation Services
  • Health Checks
  • Penetration Testing
  • Vulnerability Assessments
  • Threat and Risk Assessment
  • Enablement & Training
  • Ongoing Support

Secure Sense focuses on continual training and certification among our technical ranks in order to provide the most knowledgeable technical support.

Security training

Secure Sense offers security training and can assist in helping your organization to create its cyber security training program. From general employee awareness training to specific security training for your IT and security staff, Secure Sense can help your organization combat the threats they face on a daily basis. Our team is able to offer:

  • Engaging user awareness training for end-users
  • Technology training for security solutions and products
  • Security Analyst training
  • Threat hunting training
  • Threat simulations to give your internal security teams practice in using internal tools
  • Tabletop exercise development and execution to simulate incidents and incident response

Your Key word is “Purple Team”

Don’t forget! Take this keyword and head to our LinkedIn page here to comment on it for your chance to win one of many prizes this month!

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about Secure Sense’s competitive advantage or any of our services, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at 866-999-7506 or sales@securesense.ca!

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