The ANTS service, developed by MSB, alerts organizations when technical vulnerabilities in Swedish IT environments need to be addressed. New functionality is now being added to ANTS to strengthen societal resilience and improve Sweden’s cybersecurity.
To reinforce societal resilience and reduce the impact of cyberattacks targeting Swedish society, MSB—through its CERT-SE function—is continuing to develop ANTS, the Automated Notifications of Technical Vulnerabilities service. ANTS is a free service that helps Swedish organizations monitor their attack surface on the internet. ANTS issues warnings when there are indications that something in an organization’s IT environment needs attention. This might involve devices that have been connected to commandeered botnets, servers running vulnerable software, or services with insecure configurations.
A new feature in ANTS can now also detect if a device is suspected of being compromised — meaning it is possible to determine, or at least not rule out, that information has been stolen or modified in an organization’s IT environment as a result of an exploited vulnerability or an intrusion. It can also indicate that protective functions have been disabled or that some component of the IT environment has been damaged.
“With the new features in ANTS, more anomalies will be detected so they can be remediated more quickly, making the Swedish IP space safer,” says Andreas Stenmark, head of the technical cybersecurity unit at MSB.
He continues:
“We believe the service will be highly valuable given the growing threat against critical infrastructure in Sweden. The threat landscape ranges from sophisticated, targeted attacks to simpler malicious tools such as Chaos RAT, which underscores the need for robust security measures. This is especially important for organizations that lack the resources to scan their own IT environments—small municipalities, for example. We will continue to develop ANTS so the service delivers clear benefits across cyber-Sweden.”
The ANTS service is free, and all Swedish organizations may sign up. Read more on Cert.se.