Advanced attacks like SolarWinds and Hafnium are easily bypassing conventional security tools and targeting a blind spot – application runtime. Even organizations with exemplary cybersecurity infrastructure in place missed the evasive remote code execution exploits taking place within their networks. While most tools try to guess at threats at the perimeter, or look for clues after the fact, they view application workloads as a “black box.”
Dave Furneaux, CEO of Virsec, discusses the urgent need to gain visibility and control over critical workloads as code executes. We must assume the attackers are already present in the environment. So rather than trying to stop everything ‘bad’ (which is an infinite problem), a runtime protection model focuses on making sure that code and applications only perform as they should at the web, host, and memory layers – effectively stopping the kill chain at the first step.