The gathering of intelligence is resource intensive, requiring high-level and expensive skills. Without these skills and intelligence, a company increases its risk of being compromised through possible vulnerabilities in its systems, as it is not possible to proactively fix something if one is not even aware the problem exists.The question is therefore, "How does one acquire this intelligence without having to make a substantial investment in skilled resources? "The answer is through the use of intelligent alerting services. A service that is able to provide configurable alerts specific to an organisation's requirements, on a timely basis, and to the right person.
Does such a service exist? The good news is that it does. There are a few organisations that provide this service as part of their managed / monitoring services. SANS and Security Focus are well known in the industry for their part in distributing quality information with regards to security and vulnerabilities.SANS provides the Security Alert Consensus newsletter through electronic mail (http://www.sans.org/sansnews) for free. The subscription can be "personalised" by selecting the operating systems / sections to which you wish to be subscribed. The drawback is that the information is delivered weekly and cannot be further customised.
Security Focus offers SIA (http://www.securityfocus.com), an annual subscription based service, which provides an alerting service that can be customised to provide alerts through a variety of means including fax and voice. The alerts are provided as soon as the information is added to the database. The service can be fully customised to provide alerting only on products and technologies that are relevant to the organisation, and can even be tailored so that alerts for different technologies reach the correct person. This means that the team responsible for network infrastructure will not receive alerts that are only relevant to the web development team, helping reduce the overload of irrelevant information.
With new vulnerabilities being discovered everyday, an intelligent alerting service is a crucial component in the arsenal required to combat the onslaught of attacks and vulnerabilities in an online business. The proactive companies that were quick to realise the potential of the Internet and the digital revolution provided themselves with a competitive advantage compared with their rivals who were slow to adopt the technology. The companies that fail to be proactive and adopt Threat Management as a part of their security strategy will soon find themselves at a distinct disadvantage, possibly even out of the game!
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