Announcing Risk-Based Endpoint Security with Cisco Secure Endpoint and Kenna Security: With a tidal wave of vulnerabilities out there and brand-new vulnerabilities coming out daily, security teams have a lot to handle. Addressing every single vulnerability is nearly impossible and prioritizing them is no easy task either since it’s difficult to effectively focus on the small number of vulnerabilities that matter most to your organization. Moreover, the shift to hybrid work makes it harder to assess and prioritize your vulnerabilities across your endpoints with traditional vulnerability scanners.
Kenna Security maps out the vulnerabilities in your environment and prioritizes the order in which you should address them based on a risk score. We’re excited to announce that after Cisco acquired Kenna Security last year, we have recently launched an integration between Kenna and Cisco Secure Endpoint to add valuable vulnerability context into the endpoint.
With this initial integration, Secure Endpoint customers can now perform risk-based endpoint security. It enables customers to prioritize endpoint protection and enhances threat investigation to accelerate incident response with three main use cases:
Scanner less vulnerability visibility: In a hybrid work environment, it’s increasingly difficult for traditional vulnerability scanners to account for all devices being used. Instead of relying on IP address scanning to identify vulnerabilities in an environment, you can now use the existing Secure Endpoint agent to get a complete picture of the vulnerabilities you need to triage.
Risk-based vulnerability context: During incident response, customers now have an additional data point in the form of a Kenna risk score. For example, if a compromised endpoint has a risk score of 95+, there is a high likelihood that the attack vector relates to a vulnerability that Kenna has identified. This can dramatically speed up incident response by helping the responder focus on the right data.
Accurate, actionable risk scores: Organizations often struggle to prioritize the right vulnerabilities since most risk scores such as Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) are static and lack important context. In contrast, the Kenna Risk Score is dynamic with rich context since it uses advanced data science techniques such as predictive modeling and machine learning to consider real-world threats. This enables you to understand the actual level of risk in your environment and allows you effectively prioritize and remediate the most important vulnerabilities first.
How does the Kenna integration work?
The Kenna integration brings Kenna Risk Scores directly into your Secure Endpoint console.
Risk scores can be anywhere from 0 (lowest risk) to 100 (highest risk). The score is inferred based on the reported OS version, build, and revision update information, combined with threat intelligence on vulnerabilities from Kenna.
Each vulnerability has a risk score, an identifier, and a description that includes icons with additional details based on vulnerability intelligence from Kenna:
Active Internet Breach: This vulnerability is being exploited across active breaches on the Internet
Easily Exploitable: This vulnerability is easy to exploit with proof-of-concept code being potentially available
Malware Exploitable: There is known malware exploiting this vulnerability
All of this information is extremely valuable context during an incident investigation. Exploiting vulnerabilities is one of the most common ways malicious actors carry out attacks, so by quickly understanding which vulnerabilities are present in the environment, incident responders have a much easier time honing in on how an attacker got into their organization.
Additionally, for vulnerabilities that currently have fixes available, clicking on the green “Fix Available” button on each vulnerability displays a box with links to the applicable patches, knowledge base articles, and other relevant information. This gives analysts the information they need to efficiently act on an endpoint.
