SecurityBrief Australia - Technology news for CISOs & cybersecurity decision-makers
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Cybersecurity is your defensive strategy, cyber resilience is your business
Fri, 16th Feb 2024

The recent mass exploitation of critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti solutions has caused significant disruption for the company’s thousands of customers. This led to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issuing a directive to “all federal agencies to disconnect the impacted Ivanti products from their networks and perform additional forensic analysis and clean-up steps in case they’ve already been compromised.” But that’s just the disruptive effect the situation had on federal users. The incident is impacting countless enterprises as well, with Ivanti stating it has more than 40 thousand customers. *

This evolving scenario highlights a crucial lesson for all organisations – we must move away from reliance on cybersecurity strategies alone and pivot towards Cyber Resilience to ensure overall protection and business continuity.

The Concept of Cyber Resilience

Cyber Resilience is a paradigm that extends beyond traditional cybersecurity. It's about ensuring that your digital operations, which are the heart of your organisation, can withstand and quickly recover from any cyberattack, technical malfunction, or even deliberate tampering.

This concept has never been more relevant as organisations across the globe, now natively remote and connected, confront the reality of persistent and sophisticated threats. We all know there is an attack coming, a breach waiting to happen, and a disruption around the next corner. It’s the Cyber Resilient organisations that know they’ve made the right investments to significantly reduce the risk of their operations grinding to a halt.

The Absolute Approach to Cyber Resilience

Absolute puts the concept of Cyber Resilience into action. Our unique, firmware-embedded technology fortifies the foundation of our customers’ digital infrastructures. We are rooted in the firmware of more than 600 million endpoints deployed to 14 million users. This allows us to ensure that the largest fleet of devices, critical security controls, and network access applications are ineffaceable, perpetually recoverable, and working as intended – regardless of the threats they face.

When customers’ devices go missing, we find them. When their laptops are compromised, we isolate them. When their security and access applications fail, we restore them. When their employees are locked out of their endpoints by ransomware, we get them back into service.

Mitigating Risk Posed by Ivanti Vulnerabilities with Absolute Cyber Resilience

To help customers and other organisations impacted by the disclosed Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure Zero Days and other vulnerabilities, Absolute is stepping forward. We are offering free Absolute Secure Endpoint and Absolute Secure Access product licenses and support for 90 days, along with the expertise needed to quickly deploy and scale replacement solutions across endpoints. This initiative is not just about mitigating an immediate threat, but also aimed at fostering a longer-term shift towards Cyber Resilience in the global economy.

The Path Towards Cyber Resilience

The current Ivanti situation is one in a long list of many, with certainly many more that will follow. We have to turn our immediate attention to incidents that are impacting us right now while not losing sight of how important it is to be prepared for the next vulnerability. The question becomes, how do we look forward with hindsight?
During these uncertain economic times, organisations can’t afford to have their business disrupted. In this challenging period, the answer is clear: organisations must pivot towards Cyber Resilience, adopting robust protection, the persistence to withstand unforeseen challenges, and the ability to quickly restore systems to a healthy and productive state. Cyber Resilience isn’t just cybersecurity – it’s your business.

Importantly, CISA has stated that from the start, their instructions stated that you could turn Ivanti's impacted products back on after patching. CISA has also made it clear that its guidance always provided information for agencies to bring the appliances back online, not simply to permanently take Ivanti systems out of production.