Businesses at risk due to unidentified network traffic

KOTA KINABALU: IT managers cannot identify 45 per cent of their organisation's network traffic, according to Sophos, a global leader in network and endpoint security, in its global survey, The Dirty Secrets of Network Firewalls.

In fact, nearly one-in-four cannot identify 70 per cent of their network traffic. The lack of visibility creates significant security challenges for today's businesses and impacts effective network management.

The survey polled more than 2,700 IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in 10 countries including the US, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, UK, Australia, Japan, India, and South Africa.

Considering the debilitating impact cyber-attacks can have on a business, it's unsurprising that 84 per cent of respondents agree that a lack of application visibility is a serious security concern. Without the ability to identify what's running on their network, IT managers are blind to ransomware, unknown malware, data breaches and other advanced threats, as well as potentially malicious applications and rogue users.

Network firewalls with signature-based detection are unable to provide adequate visibility into application traffic due to a variety of factors such as the increasing use of encryption, browser emulation, and advanced evasion techniques.

“You cannot fight a threat, if you can't see it. Lack of visibility on networks can leave organisations struggling to investigate anomalous network activity and take remedial actions in near real-time,” Sophos managing director of Asean and Korea Sumit Bansal said.

“Cybercriminals are aware of this and are actively exploiting these blind spots to infiltrate data over a long period of time, undetected. Remediation takes time and this is not an ideal situation for organisations.”