The challenge with safeguarding legacy software
All organisations have the challenge of keeping business moving, whilst also protecting and securing the working environment. vRx provides full visibility into the vulnerabilities (CVEs) identified in your environment, as well as providing the means to automate the remediation, and reduce time to reduce risk.
However, the problem with vulnerabilities increases hugely when legacy applications must still be used for mission critical operations, (for example, where particular versions of Java must be run), despite high profile vulnerabilities, and despite the security teams, and IT teams being fully aware, and having raised these risks to senior management.
In many cases there simply is not the budget, or capability to replace these older applications, despite the desire to do so.
So, what can be done in these instances in terms of risk reduction?
Virtual Patching by vRx
Vicarius vRx is a cloud based platform, and at its heart has a technology, fundamental to its operation, called Virtual Patching.
Virtual Patching is a multi-layered security mechanism which secures the executable of the vulnerable software and the related binary files. This is achieved by protecting the memory space of the vulnerable software against any injection/scraping related attempts and also by securing the vulnerable functions in-memory.
How does it work?
The in-memory protection uses state-of-the-art dynamic binary instrumentation (DBI) technology which tracks the vulnerable functions upon loading to the memory space of the vulnerable asset. Then, upon exploitation attempts, the implemented code either notifies the admin or blocks the system call in memory (subject to configuration).
See this video for more details.
Similarly where a high priority vulnerability is published, but no patch released, Virtual Patching can mitigate the risk until such time as a patch is released for the vulnerable software.
The patch can then be deployed through the automated processes (and virtual patching automatically disabled) in the vRx platform, and full visibility and reporting on the affected application(s), and assets can be fully tracked through the vRx dashboard.
No patch? No problem!
