Know what you are protecting. Its a basic tenet of cybersecurity, and one that too many organizations struggle to achieve. It can be overwhelming to deal with the issues you know about, but what happens when your solution to the awareness problem isn’t any better informed than you are?
For those of you were old enough to watch the news in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, you probably remember a seemingly nonsensical statement made by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about intelligence relative to the issue of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction:
“...there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some thing we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
For those of you were old enough to watch the news in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, you probably remember a seemingly nonsensical statement made by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about intelligence relative to the issue of Iraq and weapons of mass destruction:
“...there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some thing we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns; the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
The same phenomenon is true when it comes to protecting your enterprise. There is what you know about (the equipment you bought), what you know about but don’t have a real handle on (BYOD), and there are the things you have no idea exist and that they might be a problem for you (rogue IT). There are things like the CVE to help you with knowns, but by definition you have no idea what you’re facing when it comes to the truly unknown.
“Well,” you say, “there are solutions for that.” Sure. <Large Networking Corporation> makes a great product called <redacted> that will allow you to register and manage your devices. With NAC and identity management capabilities one can easily ‘enroll’ and ‘provision’ devices, but here's the rub: you have to know those devices exist in the first place. There is still the issue of unknown unknowns to deal with.
“But I have all this other technology and products to tell me what’s going on in my network.”
That’s great. How do you know they’re working? How do you know they’re accurate? You’ve got full visibility into everything that transits the network and insight into the behavior of every piece of gear, every OS, firmware and software, do you? You might know what it is and who made it, but only the bad guys really know the intimate details of the components of your enterprise, which is why 0-days exist and data breaches are a thing.
“What you want to achieve impossible.”
Well, it can be very hard, but it is not impossible. If we can invite the Secretary back to finish his quote:
“And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category (unknown unknowns) that tend to be the difficult ones.”
Knowing exactly what your enterprise is made of, in real-time, 24/7, is not impossible. In fact, it can be quite simple. We designed Senrio Insight to do just that, as software that passively collects metadata about every device that uses your bandwidth - known and unknown - identifies it, learns how it behaves, and tells you when something behaves abnormally. If you’re ready to get rid of the unknown unknowns in your enterprise, sign up to learn more.
“Well,” you say, “there are solutions for that.” Sure. <Large Networking Corporation> makes a great product called <redacted> that will allow you to register and manage your devices. With NAC and identity management capabilities one can easily ‘enroll’ and ‘provision’ devices, but here's the rub: you have to know those devices exist in the first place. There is still the issue of unknown unknowns to deal with.
“But I have all this other technology and products to tell me what’s going on in my network.”
That’s great. How do you know they’re working? How do you know they’re accurate? You’ve got full visibility into everything that transits the network and insight into the behavior of every piece of gear, every OS, firmware and software, do you? You might know what it is and who made it, but only the bad guys really know the intimate details of the components of your enterprise, which is why 0-days exist and data breaches are a thing.
“What you want to achieve impossible.”
Well, it can be very hard, but it is not impossible. If we can invite the Secretary back to finish his quote:
“And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category (unknown unknowns) that tend to be the difficult ones.”
Knowing exactly what your enterprise is made of, in real-time, 24/7, is not impossible. In fact, it can be quite simple. We designed Senrio Insight to do just that, as software that passively collects metadata about every device that uses your bandwidth - known and unknown - identifies it, learns how it behaves, and tells you when something behaves abnormally. If you’re ready to get rid of the unknown unknowns in your enterprise, sign up to learn more.
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