Industry Coalition Calls For Enhanced Network Resilience

A new industry group of big-name vendors has launched with a mission to improve network and hardware resilience worldwide.

Coordinated by the non-profit Center for Cybersecurity Policy & Law, the Network Resilience Coalition counts among its founding members AT&T, Broadcom, BT Group, Cisco Systems, Fortinet, Intel, Juniper Networks, Lumen Technologies, Palo Alto Networks, Verizon and VMware.

The alliance argued that, while these vendors and their peers work hard to make their products as secure as possible, end-customer patching and vulnerability management is often sub-par. This puts individual organizations at risk and can create the conditions for global threat campaigns to thrive.

The coalition cited Russian campaign Jaguar Tooth, which was discovered this year but exploited a legacy vulnerability from 2017 to compromise Cisco routers around the world.

Read more on patching challenges: Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities: The Race to Patch

“Network resilience is vital to the health of our economy and our interconnected world and there is a need to focus on how to improve the security of the larger ecosystem by all sides working together,” said Ari Schwartz, coordinator of the Center for Cybersecurity Policy & Law.

“Too often we see organizations fall victim to a cyber-attack because an existing critical update or patch wasn’t made.”

To that end, the coalition brings together major infrastructure vendors and network operators to share their expertise in how to deploy patches promptly. It’s hoped that members will also be able to encourage end-user organizations to improve network visibility to improve cyber-risk mitigation.

The first action item for the industry group will be to produce a report outlining the key challenges facing IT and security teams, as well as recommendations on how to improve network security – for tech users, providers and security policymakers.