Why Are Whitelisting Applications So Popular?

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Application whitelisting

Many companies are wary about the threats that they face online, and take numerous measures to protect their data. Firewalls are set in place to ensure that unauthorised individuals are not able to tap into the company’s mainframe, and several other security measures are taken to ensure that their data remain secure. However, regardless of how many security measures you take, mishaps can still happen. Employees may unknowingly run an application on their computer that might spread across the network.

Many types of virus programs are disguised as harmless applications, that when opened, can quickly take over an entire network. The last thing that any company network manager would want is to relinquish control of their data and network to an outsider that holds the data for ransom. To combat this issue and secure the network, many companies now prefer using whitelist applications. Some consider whitelisting applications to be an extreme measure for tackling hacking issues. However, many companies have now begun to adopt them for a variety of reasons. Some of the major benefits that they provide include:

Understanding the Process

Application whitelisting is basically the opposite of application blacklisting. Only a select number of applications are allowed to operate on the computers connected to the network. This means that a user on the network will not be able to run unidentified applications.

The whitelisting service is customised according to the needs of the company. The security company will install the application on all the computers within the company, and then block all other applications except a select few. The hex code of each program run on the computers is monitored to check if the program isn’t disguised as something else. Setting up the whitelisting application will take a day or two while the company sets up the program across the network and deploys it.

Advantages

Application whitelisting offers a variety of advantages that you don’t get with conventional security programs. Most security programs deal with threats once they enter the network. Application whitelisting prevents malicious programs from entering the server at all. Traditional blacklisting programs are not able to prevent what is known as a zero-day attack, which is a type of malicious attack that exploits the software vulnerability within a program.

That’s because the attack hasn’t been observed yet, so countermeasures cannot be created. However, application whitelisting programs are capable of preventing such an attack because they don’t allow certain programs to run at all, since all applications that haven’t been whitelisted are completely blocked. For companies that store most of their sensitive data on the cloud, this is a major requirement. These are a few important things that you should know about whitelisting applications and how they work.