When there is a period of peace (no cyber attack), businesses tend to get busy with other priorities relaxing their Mean Time To Remediate (MTTR). It all makes sense until it becomes a news!
Here is a recent story of where relaxing MTTR resulted in Billions of losses:
On 17th March 2023, Hitachi Energy released a short statement on their recent third-party cybersecurity incident. It was brief and clear: “an attack by the Cl0p ransomware group that could have resulted in an unauthorized access to employee data in some countries”.
Four days later on 21st March, Bleeping Computer reported another one of Cl0p’s latest victims, Saks Fifth Avenue: “Unauthorised access to some of their mock customer data”.
On their dark web site Cl0p claimed they have access to data of 130 different organisations worldwide where they released data from over 60 of the victims while held over 100 companies ransomed in the short period of time.
Among attacked organisations, in Australia, was the Government of Tasmania who lost about 16000 financial documents related to the department of education; Rio Tinto who lost some of their employees’ data and Melbourne Uni who lost some of their accounting data.
The story started well before March 2023. In fact, the vulnerability was reported first on 30th January to the vendor, Fortra, and they secured it (CVE-2023-0669) within five days, but many firms fail to promptly apply updates following security disclosures.
That’s where the ransomware group Cl0p could successfully launch attacks on over 130 companies through the vulnerability, including Hitachi Energy, Proctor & Gamble, and many others including those mentioned above.
So, how does it impact you? Let me share some stats…
According to Qualys, this vulnerability was among top 10 exploited vulnerabilities in 2023 but despite its criticality and spread level, the MTTR on it was terribly low at about 31 days. And guess the patch rate percentage for this vulnerability… only 33%, leaving 77% of systems unprotected and exposed!
Think about it… This is the situation with a top 10 exploited vulnerability!
Imagine how many of these exploitable vulnerabilities exist in your IT environment without your knowledge, right tools to detect them and skilled resources to expeditiously remediate them.
You can put all that at ease like our other clients (Toyota, 7Eleven and many SMBs) who are leveraging our on-demand highly advanced yet affordable threat exposure management solution.