What do you really know about the vulnerabilities of your network equipment?
An equipment manufacturer could have released a notice about a major security problem, but the widely-released email might have made it into your SPAM filter.
Additionally, many network equipment manufacturers don’t like to broadly advertise vulnerabilities via email, as it creates an almost continuous reminder that their products have faults.
To solve this problem, the National Institute of Standards (NIST) set up the National Vulnerability Database (nvd.nist.gov) where vendors can report vulnerabilities so users can check their equipment and OS versions to determine if security vulnerabilities exist. You can visit their website and search the vulnerabilities that relate to each of your network devices to learn what problems exist, and get the vendor’s recommended remediation methodologies.
Depending on the number of devices on your network, this may take multiple days to perform a network audit and determine the security exposure of your network. The worst part is that new vulnerabilities are discovered on a daily basis, so it’s challenging to use a manual process to keep updated.
Figure 1. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD)
PathSolutions Added Security Automation
NIST has a wonderful RESTful API that can be used to fetch vulnerability information. With the right translation and interpretation capabilities, the API will lookup device manufacturers and operating system versions in the database and related to the vulnerabilities.
A completely pain-free way of learning about your system’s device and OS vulnerabilities is by using TotalView, which is now completely integrated with NIST’s data:
Figure 2. TotalView's Network Device Vulnerabilities Tab
Every 24 hours, TotalView will fetch the latest vulnerability information from NIST’s NVD and associate it with your network equipment. TotalView will drill down into the details for each device to see all of the known vulnerabilities it has, as well as link back to NIST’s CVE bug numbers for additional information.
Network security problems can be prevented if the right information is brought to bear about your network’s operations. The security features introduced in TotalView version 10 are designed to make sure that you have complete awareness of your environment, not only by helping you track device vulnerabilities, but also allowing you to set network security communications policies.Contact us with questions about how PathSolutions TotalView can make understanding your network easier.
