> Network defenders should shorten their patch testing and deployment timelines.
Shortening patch cycles will only help so much. It's funny that whenever an NPM supply chain attack is published, people recommend a cooldown before installing new versions, and then when a vulnerability is discovered, everybody jumps to patch. Clearly these two strategies collide at some point.
> The critical controls laid out by organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre are now all the more important, since they improve security without depending on any single patch landing in time. These include steps like hardening networks’ default configurations, enforcing multi-factor authentication, and keeping comprehensive logs for detection and response.
Most of these proposed controls are not new at all, but they are often costly to implemented and harm velocity in other ways, which is why they aren't widely in place.
For example, a super effective control is filtering outgoing network traffic. Many exploits rely on loading second and maybe third stages from the Internet, and if you block outgoing requests by default, it won't work.
But, blocking outgoing requests by default is super hard, and you risk blocking security updates etc. It can kinda work for a deployed application, but for an employee workstation? Basically impossible.
I wonder if we're approaching an era where we have to go back to saying "you cannot do this, because security" much more often than we'd like.