SecurityMetrics Pulse: Detecting Compromises in Your Network’s Gray Area

Large businesses and franchises often have one central headquarters and many smaller remote or satellite locations. Some may even include telecommuting employees. While security efforts like vulnerability scans and penetration tests tend to focus on headquarters, remote locations can be just as critical for your network security.

At SecurityMetrics, we've seen entire headquarters' operations held ransom by malware that was initially downloaded onto the network through a remote franchise location. 

Situations like this are due in part to the "gray area" that often surrounds remote locations, where responsibility for security can become fuzzy. Is the headquarters responsible for data security and compliance? Or is it the franchise? What about employees working from home? How trustworthy is their home network?

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What can be done to help mitigate the risks that gray-area networks pose to your network, while privacy and control are retained by the respective network owners? In this blog, you will learn what attacks networks are experiencing and how SecurityMetrics Pulse can detect these threats ahead of time, so you have the knowledge you need to defend your business. 

See also: PCI Requirement 11 Vulnerability Scans and Penetration Tests

Protecting Networks from Attacks

Working backward from large corporate data breaches, we've been able to pinpoint some of the most common attack vectors used in network breaches:

• Phishing emails
• Social engineering
• Gray area network attacks from franchise, employee, or 3rd-parties making remote connections.
• Less secure networks with intermittent access to more secure networks.

If you are a large franchise or corporate entity with many remote locations, it's crucial to find a network security company that can provide vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and other security services that include the “gray area” of networks to monitor for threats, vulnerabilities and malicious activity while also providing assurance to network owners that they are still in control of their own networks and privacy.

Large corporate networks and structures can enforce and manage network security in a variety of ways. Since they typically need more network security than a basic home office or small business, they usually dedicate more resources, time, and even entire positions and departments to security.

For large organizations, vulnerability scanning can help save time in identifying serious risks such as misconfigured firewalls, malware hazards, and remote access vulnerabilities.

Managed Detection and Lateral Movement Defense

Pulse mitigates the risk of lateral movement—the primary method by which a compromised remote node leads to a full-scale corporate breach—by deploying XDR endpoint protection and high-fidelity sensors across the distributed environment. These sensors ingest and correlate background telemetry, including firewall logs and system events, which are then analyzed by the SecurityMetrics Threat Intelligence Center. 

By utilizing superior SIEM technology to monitor network traffic for known malicious IPs and anomalous behavior 24/7, Pulse identifies compromised segments in real-time. This proactive "threat hunting" approach ensures that ransomware or malicious encryption processes are isolated at the remote location or virtual machine level before they can tunnel into the core network.

Prioritized Remediation and Compliance Engineering

For businesses managing hundreds of remote endpoints, the challenge isn't just detecting threats, it's overcoming alert fatigue by knowing what to prioritize. Pulse addresses this by generating a prioritized vulnerability list categorized by risk factors such as outdated software, network misconfigurations, and unsupported OS versions. This data is reviewed by a Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst, who provides a monthly executive-level risk breakdown of persistent versus resolved vulnerabilities. 

Also, for businesses operating under strict regulatory frameworks, Pulse integrates Qualified Security Assessor (QSA) oversight directly into your security. This means that internal and external vulnerability scans aren't just checked boxes, but are technically validated to meet PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR mandates, even working in the formal submission of Attestations of Compliance (AOC) and Reports on Compliance (ROC).

Hardening Your External Security

Do you know what vulnerabilities threaten your external network security? Pulse scans for external threats to help you stay ahead of cyber criminals who attempt to exploit your organization’s locations through external vulnerabilities.

• Low cost per location
• Low-touch implementation (only requires account setup and external IP addresses), no on-site installation required

Monitoring Your Internal Security

Pulse provides internal security that gives you visibility into what is happening on the inside of your extended network. The internal scans find the internal vulnerabilities (what a hacker would have access to if they got inside the network).

• Easy-to-install collector device that collects system events on the network and sends them to SecurityMetrics SOC/SIEM for analysis
• No network reconfiguration necessary
• The collector device allows internal vulnerability scans to be run inside each location (all-in-one)

See The Threats You’ve Been Missing

Using SecurityMetrics Pulse, organizations can now eliminate the ambiguity of "who is responsible" by providing both headquarters and remote owners with a clear, prioritized roadmap for reducing risk. 

Whether it’s through managed threat hunting, automated internal and external vulnerability scanning, or the specialized oversight of a QSA, Pulse ensures that no corner of your network remains in the dark. 

Learn more about Pulse here.

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