Top Computer Security Vulnerabilities

When your computer is connected to an unsecured network, your software security could be compromised without certain protocols in place. Forgetting updates, product weakness and unresolved developer issues leave your clients wide open to computer security vulnerabilities. Here is a list of several types of vulnerabilities that compromise the integrity, availability and confidentiality of your clients' products.

Exposure Leads to Threats

Critical errors in your clients' computer software can leave data in the entire network vulnerable to a number of malicious threats, including:

  • Malware
  • Phishing
  • Proxies
  • Spyware
  • Adware
  • Botnets
  • Spam

Cyber attackers, hackers and malware can take over your clients' software, disable it and steal data. How does this happen?

Common Computer Security Vulnerabilities

Your clients' software connects outsiders on their networks to the inner workings of the operating system. Every time a user opens a program on the operating system without restrictions or limited access, the user potentially invites attackers to cross over and rewrite the codes that keep information protected.

In 2011, the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) identified the Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors. While the list remains comprehensive, there are many other threats that leave software vulnerable to attack.

The most common software security vulnerabilities include:

  • Missing data encryption
  • OS command injection
  • SQL injection
  • Buffer overflow
  • Missing authentication for critical function
  • Missing authorization
  • Unrestricted upload of dangerous file types
  • Reliance on untrusted inputs in a security decision
  • Cross-site scripting and forgery
  • Download of codes without integrity checks
  • Use of broken algorithms
  • URL redirection to untrusted sites
  • Path traversal
  • Bugs
  • Weak passwords
  • Software that is already infected with virus

The list grows larger every year as new ways to steal and corrupt data are discovered.

Internal Network Security

There are even more security breaches that occur from within a network. Watch out for USB drives, unencrypted laptops and netbooks, unsecured wireless access points, unrestricted employee access, untrustworthy humans and smartphones and misused emails.

How to Prevent Computer Security Vulnerabilities

Your clients' data is important for so many reasons. Now, more than ever, protecting their data is an integral part of business.

Software security tools and services for transferring large data sets can help users find architectural weaknesses and stay up to date with reliable data tracking and measuring. At SolarWinds MSP (formerly LOGICnow), we combine Web Protection with Managed Antivirus, MailProtection, patch management and backup to offer clients complete protection from every security angle, delivering comprehensive web security, web filtering and bandwidth monitoring.

Our SolarWinds MSP software is one of the best-in-class security programs with 100% cloud competency. We keep your clients' computer networks and backed-up data safe and secure from vulnerabilities by:

  • Staying on top of bandwidth usage with alerts when devices exceed thresholds
  • Blocking users from visiting suspected and confirmed unsafe sites
  • Setting white lists and black lists to override category based filters
  • Applying Web Bandwidth checks
  • Filtering Internet activity by day, category and URL to reveal trends, spikes and irregularities
  • Completing with detailed reporting tools to let you analyze browsing activity and demonstrate the effectiveness of web security
  • Identifying risks with our iScan Online software to tell you where it is and places a dollar value to the risk of it being there

Protect your clients' data. Start a free trial today.

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Sources:
Integrity, availability and confidentiality: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc751383.aspx

Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors: http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/index.html

Breaches that occur from within your network: http://www.networkworld.com/article/2193965/tech-primers/top-10-vulnerabilities-inside-the-network.html

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