NTA Monitor

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Will IE6 be the next NT4?

1st October 2009 All penetration testers will remember the long tail of Windows NT 4.0, and how this operating system continued to be used long past the point when security updates stopped at the end of 2004. For many years the presence of an unpatchable NT4 server was a common issue in a penetration test report, and it is only now, almost five years after security support ended, that finding an NT4 system on a network is becoming a rare event. Read More

One in four web applications susceptible to high risk security flaws

7th September 2009 NTA Monitor has reported a 10% increase in the total number of web applications found to have at least one high-risk security issue... Read More

Organisations facing a changing threat landscape

20th July 2009 According to NTA Monitor's 2009 Annual Security Report, the average number of Internet security vulnerabilities is on the rise... Read More

The Return of the Insider Threat

1st July 2009 When NTA started security testing twelve years ago, the main focus was on the insider threat. There were many reports with statistics showing that most security breaches were due to insiders. By contrast there was very little focus on the external threat via Internet and third-party network links. Back then many companies did not even have a firewall. Read More

Solutions not excuses for patch management warns NTA Monitor

Rigorous patch management is a fundamental security requirement for any organsation today and yet, warns Internet security testing specialist, NTA Monitor, far too many companies' servers remain unpatched despite the serious threats this poses.

In recent years, the threats and risks to organisations have increased dramatically with viruses and worms becoming more stealthy and more intelligent, enabling systems to be compromised at a hacker's leisure. Despite the regular reporting of newly discovered defects in software that cyber criminals can use to exploit vulnerable systems, NTA sees the same patch problems occurring.

Roy Hills, Technical Director at NTA Monitor says: "We hear companies time and again telling us that they don't want to take their server down for it to be patched or updated because it wastes time. Or they believe that the technical skill required to successfully exploit vulnerabilities is such that an attack is unlikely. Yet we know that attacks are now increasingly common and how disastrous they can be both financially and in terms of disruption to business. So, we are urging companies to understand that they must take a systematic and efficient approach to patch management on both Internet facing systems and internal segments, to ensure that the security vulnerabilities in a company's information system are addressed."

NTA advises companies on the most appropriate way to improve their patch management and says that those companies that do take it seriously bring a high degree of accountability and discipline to the task of discovering, analysing and correcting security weaknesses, giving them an edge on their competitors. "We believe that companies should have a policy of having a cluster of servers which are all operating in the same way, so if one is taken out to be tested, the other servers can still run. This one server can then be fixed and filtered down to the others. When a server has been patched and if a company has a standard build, they can test if the patch has been successful on one PC and if it has been, it should then work across the network. Patch management seems to be one of those areas of security that many companies prefer to ignore. We are telling them that they do this at their peril," says Hills.

This article was first released on: 23rd April 2008