Reduce compliance and vulnerability risks in the public sector

Manage your attack surface, adopt a Zero Trust approach, and comply with BOD 22-01 with the Skybox Security Posture Management Platform.

Lack of visibility and context across on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments make it especially difficult to navigate two aspects of risk management.

1. Compliance

The surge of new compliance frameworks, evolving regulatory requirements, and internal security policies add pressure to IT and security teams who struggle to keep up. The challenges are compounded for public sector organizations with multiple locations, hybrid environments, and numerous cybersecurity point products. The recent memorandum on Zero Trust Cybersecurity Principles requires agencies to meet specific Zero Trust standards and objectives by the end of fiscal year 2024.2 This sweeping, administration-wide effort to modernize cybersecurity approaches has many organizations unsure of where to begin.

It is a well-known cybersecurity maxim that it is impossible to address the threats that one cannot see. To proactively address breach and compliance risk, Skybox develops a network model – a dynamic representation of an organization’s routing tables and configurations across the hybrid infrastructure. This abstraction of the corporate infrastructure allows network and security teams the ability to visualize and understand attack paths, validate network segmentation, and optimize rule sets through simulation tasks executed against the network model.

The Skybox Security Posture Management Platform encodes the standards and requirements for external regulatory frameworks and internal corporate security policies into easily customizable, out-of-the-box templates. The platform allows actual configurations and rules to be validated against policy templates so that violating rules can be pinpointed and rectified quickly. Firewall rule sets can be optimized to eliminate overly permissive rules and reduce the organizational attack surface. This facilitates network policy and firewall audits, helping overworked federal agency staff meet compliance obligations around perimeter visibility, network access and segmentation, configuration hygiene, and vulnerability management. In addition, Skybox automates operational workflows to implement the necessary security controls rapidly and accurately across the environment.

This visual and interactive representation of the organization’s entire attack surface combined with context-aware change management can become the cornerstone of a zero-trust strategy. This allows the agency to comply with specific objectives for device visibility and enterprise-wide network isolation

2. Vulnerability management

The restricted view in a siloed environment impacts an organization’s ability to identify and address exposures and adhere to Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) configuration standards. The Binding Operational Directive BOD-22-01 issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) drives an urgent call-to-action to federal civilian agencies.3 Under this directive, these organizations are now mandated to quickly remediate a prioritized list of known and exploited vulnerabilities.4 For many, adherence to these mandates while meeting the associated aggressive timelines represents a complex undertaking, especially due to the growing cybersecurity talent gap.

Ultimately, the fragmented and decentralized nature of their environments places public sector organizations at varying levels of risk. To comply with current and future directives, adhere to STIG standards, and effectively defend against threats, U.S. federal agencies must gain a full understanding of their attack surface.

Demonstrating compliance with BOD 22-01 can become a taxing operational burden for federal agencies. The 655 unique CVEs on the list at the time of this writing could represent millions of vulnerability occurrences across an agency’s complex IT estate. The Skybox risk scoring methodology incorporates factors such as asset importance as well as asset and vulnerability exposure which is determined by conducting attack simulation. This helps federal agency staff prioritize remediation efforts by focusing on the vulnerability occurrences that could be most harmful. The Skybox Security Posture Management Platform recommends network-based compensating controls – such as IPS signatures or firewall rule modification – to reduce the risk of imminent attacks. This buys overwhelmed security teams valuable time to plan and deploy patches or update software.