March 13, 2009
IT Power Management, particularly for endpoint computers, faces a very interesting conundrum. Think back to the summer when the economy was teetering, but had not yet completely imploded, and gas was over $4 a gallon. It did not take a lot of effort to get people engaged in a discussion about saving money by turning off PC’s at night. Fast forward to today, with gas at dipping below $2, unemployment reaching 10%, and budgets and staff being slashed. Not surprisingly, power management is a much harder sell.
But the fact remains that it is an enormous waste of energy to leave a PC on at night. Not to mention that even with conservative cost savings of $20 per PC per year – beware of vendors using Honolulu kilowatt rates in their ROI calculators – the product easily pays for itself in the first year.
The obvious answer is that endpoint power management won’t likely survive as a standalone product set and will gain real adoption when it is integrated into broader solutions that perform compliance and configuration oriented tasks on endpoint machines.
For Triumfant, adding power management was a seamless and logical extension of our capabilities. Power management encompasses an extremely small set of attributes compared to what we normally monitor (300 out of 200,000) and by adding the appropriate policies and reports and integrating controls for standard functionality such as Wake-on-LAN to our configuration and remediation functionality, Triumfant has the features and functions of the point solutions. The bottom line is that you get the functionality and the cost savings without having to introduce a point product, a new console, and the costs of ramping up the support staff.
But wait, there’s more: the hard ROI from implementing power management can pay for the costs of a much broader set of functionality, giving organizations a huge advantage when vying for budget dollars. Think about it – an actual win/win scenario that even contributes to the greater good. Put in that perspective, endpoint power management may just have a chance after all.
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Posted by Jim Ivers
March 10, 2009
In a study of data breaches by the Verizon Business Risk Team (http://tinyurl.com/3gsqcv) 18% of the breaches reported came from known vulnerabilities, while only 5% came from unknown vulnerabilities. Furthermore, 90% of the exploited known vulnerabilities had been identified for 6 months or more. That same study showed that the category VZB classified as “error” – misconfigurations, omissions, non-compliance, process breakdowns – contributed directly or indirectly to two-thirds of all breaches, with missing or misconfigured software accounting for 94% of that two-thirds.
Zero day attacks may get the press, but there are plenty of cyber criminals making a handsome living by using vulnerabilities that have been known for months. Why? Because pragmatic hackers know that in any given population of endpoint computers there will be plenty of machines that are improperly configured and out of compliance with basic essential security practices. Keeping up with these issues are completely swamping security teams, and they need automated processes that help them stem the tide.
Our solution, Resolution Manager can help plug a lot of holes in any defense in depth strategy.
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Detection and remediation of zero day attacks and the other attacks that traditional, anti-virus software does not see.
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Holistic remediation to clean up all of the damage done by an attack – not just deleting the malicious executable – that may cause additional vulnerabilities.
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Security Configuration Management – ensuring that the defensive software you have deployed is really deployed, properly configured, and in working order.
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Enforcement of Security Policies – start every day with every endpoint machine in compliance with organizational or mandated policies.
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Eliminating Unauthorized Software – making sure that endpoint machines are free from software such as the peer-to-peer application that caused the Marine One data breach.
I will be touching on each one of these in more detail over the next several days to explain how we perform these critical tasks in endpoint security and what benefits your organization could expect to see if you were to put these initiatives into action.
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Posted by John Prisco
March 6, 2009
There was a lot of chatter earlier in the week about the data breach regarding the plans for the next version of Marine One, the POTUS helicopter (http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4387). Seems that a contractor on the project had a machine with a peer-to-peer application that has been identified as the source of the leak.
The amount of unauthorized software on computers creates untold vulnerabilities that result in incidents such as this one around Marine One. The fact is, employees now see their company machines as their personal computers, and install all manner of potentially dangerous applications, regardless of the consequences. Many organizations are really in the dark about the amount of unauthorized software on their machines. I had one company relay a story about expecting to find 150 to 200 applications in their endpoint population, and instead they were shocked to find over 9,000 applications running in the first 1,000 machines they checked.
What is more surprising is that many companies don’t take the steps and enforce policies to prevent this problem. Triumfant’s solution can continually detect and automatically remove unauthorized applications without human intervention with policies that can be tuned for specific user groups and exceptions. In fact, one customer story on our web site is about a customer that uses the product for that very purpose, and is realizing significant savings in the process.
Bottom line: there is no excuse for these types of breaches, as solutions exist today – like ours – to readily eliminate peer-to-peer and other potentially harmful applications.
2 Comments | Endpoint Security | Tagged: Endpoint Security, malware, peer-to-peer | Permalink
Posted by Jim Ivers
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