Are Security Visibility Gaps Increasing Your Risk of Data Breaches?

The Equifax data breach in 2017 was one of the largest in history, with 148 million people affected. And it should never have happened. Equifax acknowledged that a patch for the Apache Struts CVE-2017-5638 vulnerability - exploited by cybercriminals as a gateway in - was available in March, well before the attacks began. However, Equifax had not updated the vulnerable software at the time of the breach, more than two months later.

Equifax was arguably brought down due to poor IT visibility. The Apache flaw was left unpatched because incomplete lists of IT assets hid the vulnerability from the security team. If the company had invested in regularly auditing its IT estate and monitoring patch levels, the security department could have patched it earlier, potentially avoiding the breach entirely.

Do you know what your security posture is?

You Can't Secure What You Can't See

You cannot monitor or protect devices and information you can't see. One of the first steps that any organisation must take to reduce risk and improve overall security is to understand the activity that is taking place on their networks and computer systems.

To establish and align a security programme with controls and technology applied correctly, organisations need to have complete security visibility. Not just a snapshot - a continuous, real-time view of every device, user, and data flow across the entire environment.

The Added Value of Security Visibility

Nearly 60% of CISOs and decision-makers consider lack of visibility a major threat to their cloud infrastructure, according to Help Net Security.

Before security teams can do anything to protect their environment, they need to see and understand what is happening or about to happen. This is precisely why a single, visual dashboard is so important for event analysis, threat monitoring and mitigation - to ensure full-spectrum visibility into threats across the entire perimeter and beyond.

Having an understanding of their IT data allows organisations to manage it in line with internal business requirements. Organisations benefit from two core outcomes:

• Enhanced security - Organisations can visualise key security metrics and have an informed understanding of vulnerabilities and risk. They can highlight the security risks to prioritise and apply appropriate remediation actions, avoid misconfigurations, and rectify compliance gaps.
• Improved efficiency - Having full transparency of their security data enables stakeholders to define holistic strategies focused on it. IT security metrics also help align IT investment to business strategy, customer experience, and cloud optimisation, helping leaders determine the value of technology and building confidence in IT performance.

Comprehensive Insights Into Your Security Posture

The APEX Security dashboard provides superior security visibility so you can understand the true scope of the risks and vulnerabilities your organisation faces and maximise the effectiveness of your efforts to protect it. Through continuous monitoring, broad measurement, and detailed security recommendations, APEX lets you make data-driven decisions on how to better manage your resources and protect your organisation.

The dashboard covers nine key areas of security visibility:

1. Vulnerabilities - Data collected from APEX Secure provides an overview of vulnerabilities across your network. The APEX Secure scan runs periodically (normally monthly). Most cyber-attacks exploit vulnerabilities within software or devices, so having visibility of these is critical in determining your level of risk and planning appropriate remediation.
2. Public Identity - A major risk within any organisation is staff whose access to the system is generally managed with username/password and multi-factor authentication. However, many staff use their corporate credentials when creating accounts on third-party websites. Many of these third-party organisations subsequently get hacked, providing hackers with the logon details of your staff. The Wavex public identity platform checks exploited databases for the details of your staff.
3. Office 365 & Azure - As most organisations move their data to the cloud, they require greater visibility into cyber-crime. IBM's 2021 report stated most organisations take 212 days to detect a cyber-crime. Wavex Advanced Threat Detection (ATD) is designed to dramatically reduce this by providing greater visibility of cyber-attacks and quickly validating the threat with staff.
4. Data Loss Prevention - This report provides an overview of breached data-loss-prevention (DLP) policies. For instance, you may restrict the use of credit-card numbers stored in documents. APEX ATD will notify individuals should they infringe on a policy.
5. IT Risk Register - Wavex maintain a risk register for areas where we have detected IT risks associated with your organisation. These are then reviewed within regular review meetings.
6. Patching Compliance - This report provides an overview of the patching levels across the organisation. Patching data comes from the APEX Remote Security Management platform.
7. Threats - This provides an overview of threats detected by your anti-virus solution across your end-points.
8. Phishing - To provide you a way to assess the susceptibility of staff to phishing emails. By populating the form, an email will be sent to the specified recipients and a report will be sent to you listing those individuals that engaged with the fake phishing email.
9. Security Recommendations - Actionable recommendations based on the full picture of your security posture, reviewed in regular meetings with your Wavex account team.

What This Means for Your Organisation

Security visibility is not a luxury reserved for enterprise organisations. SMEs are increasingly targeted precisely because attackers know that smaller businesses are less likely to have the monitoring tools and processes in place to detect an intrusion quickly. The average time to detect a breach remains measured in months, not days.

The cost of that delay is significant - both in terms of the direct financial impact of a breach and the reputational damage that follows. Organisations that invest in visibility don't just respond to incidents faster; they prevent many of them from occurring in the first place.

Not only does keeping an up-to-date dashboard of everything in your tech stack allow you to accurately monitor threats, it also helps prevent 'licence creep' - when businesses end up footing licensing bills for software that they're not even using.

Download the Full Whitepaper

The full whitepaper includes a detailed breakdown of the APEX Security dashboard, real-world examples of how visibility gaps lead to breaches, and a practical guide to assessing your current security posture. Download it using the button above, or contact the Wavex team to discuss how APEX can be deployed in your organisation.