As we saw in today’s announcement about the numerous flaws in Symantec and Norton products that allow vulnerabilities, exploits that can be run across your IT environment in a privileged context could cause extreme havoc. This is a great thing to think through as you are protecting your organization against possible security risks.
In this event, we have to consider how to quickly protect endpoints. You certainly need to update servers exposed to the internet for your mobile workforce because when speed is of essence, you cannot wait for users to come into the office. You also do not want to wait for your management agent to be online so you can push a software update. Automatic updates where your users will automatically download the software from an edge gateway is an awesome strategy that just requires an internet connection. Layering additional security controls also helps to mitigate risk of a single exposure in your environment that has a wide deployment.
In this case, anti-virus software – which is probably installed in 500 of the Fortune 500, and is likely part of your protection toolkit against malicious threats – is a threat angle itself.
In my view, having anti-virus software is just one of the tools in your layered security strategy. Looking at ways to protect yourself from this type of threat, you have many different strategies to consider:
- Email security – remove the risk of these threats being impactful as soon as a signature is available.
- Web security – remove the risk of these threats as sites are classified and as soon as signatures are available.
- Advanced firewall – block outbound traffic, inbound patterns, or other signatures from application aware firewalls.
- Least privilege – remove the rights of applications and users to install/update system files because they will have not come from a trusted source.
- Integrity monitoring – block or notice changes to critical files that could indicate a compromised system.
Scott Carlson, Technical Fellow
As Technical Fellow, Scott Carlson brings internal technical leadership to BeyondTrust, strategic guidance to our customers, and evangelism to the broader IT security community. He also plays a key role in developing innovative relationships between BeyondTrust and its technical alliance partners. Scott has over 20 years of experience in the banking, education and payment sectors, where his focus areas have included information security, data centers, cloud, virtualization, and systems architecture. He is also a noted thought leader, speaker and contributor to RSA Conference, OpenStack Foundation, Information Week and other industry institutions.
Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott served as Director of Information Security Strategy & Integration with PayPal, where he created and executed security strategy for infrastructure across all PayPal properties, including worldwide data centers, office networks, and public cloud deployments. He led several cross-departmental teams to deliver information security strategy, technical architecture, and strategic solutions across enterprise IT environments. As a member of the office of the CISO, CTO and CIO, Scott spoke on behalf of the company at global conferences. In addition, he was responsible for infrastructure budget management, vendor management, and product selection, while also serving as the cloud security strategist for private OpenStack cloud and public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure). Prior to PayPal, Scott held similar roles with Apollo Education Group and Charles Schwab.