One of the great cybersecurity challenges organizations currently face, especially smaller ones, is that they don’t know what they don’t know.
It’s tough to have your eyes on everything all the time, especially with so many pieces of software running and IoT devices extending the reach of networks broader than ever.
One potential (and free!) solution seems to be a new program from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) that alerts companies and organizations of unpatched vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit.
Under a pilot program that’s been running since January 2023, CISA has sent out more than 2,000 alerts to registered organizations regarding the existence of any unpatched vulnerabilities in CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. For those that don’t know, the KEV catalog consists of any security issues that threat actors are known to actively exploit in the wild, and often include some of the most serious vulnerabilities disclosed on a regular basis, some of which have been around for years.
Jen Easterly, CISA’s director, said last month that 49 percent of those vulnerabilities that CISA sent alerts about were mitigated — either through patching or other means. The program will launch in earnest later this year, but more than 7,000 organizations have already registered for the pilot program.
Everything about this makes sense to me — it comes at no cost to the consumer or business, it allows the government to inform organizations of something they very likely aren’t aware of, and these issues are easy enough to fix with software or hardware patches.
I’m mainly wondering how we’ll ..
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