ForeScout Blog

Everyone who's worked in the IT security business has had the experience of watching a movie or TV show where they see a hacker doing something outrageous, and they think: “That just doesn’t happen in the real world!” Well, the real world has caught up with fiction. Have you heard about the virus named Shamoon? This dangerous virus propagates and destroys target company computers. Last August, the malware hit oil company Saudi Aramco so hard that it wiped 30,000 endpoint hard drives completely clean. Most of Aramco was offline for a week while they replaced their computers. All of them.

In my last blog, I talked a bit about how network access control (NAC) can effectively augment and modernize existing IT-GRC programs by ensuring the integrity of the host-based controls they depend on. If you follow that line of thinking, you can easily see how NAC can be applied to enhance other important security and management process throughout the IT organization. In particular, extending the value of security information and event management (SIEM), vulnerability assessment and policy and configuration management tools with NAC can establish a healthy ecosystem that utilizes components more effectively offering an overall more cohesive unit.

Brian Meyer, information security officer for the 15-site Meritrust Credit Union in Kansas, recently rolled out a highly successful network access control (NAC) deployment. I sat down with him to find out what advice he has to offer others as they embark on a NAC deployment. Here are his top five recommendations:

Today’s workday is vastly different from the pre 1990’s version, when a calendar quite nicely presented a visual image of an unbroken sequence of working hours and non-working hours. Nowadays with laptops, smartphones and tablets, work is always just a few clicks away and free time seems to slip away easily. That is why it is important to find and implement time saving opportunities wherever possible. For instance, why manage manually the security administrator’s tasks when automatic processes can be implemented to save time and relieve stress?

With the smorgasbord of compliance and governance mandates putting pressure on enterprises today, many companies have mapped tools and controls across industry and regulatory compliance frameworks to more efficiently institute governance, risk and compliance (IT-GRC) best practices.

If your organization is allowing employees to use personal devices for business use, it is likely that corporate information is being stored on those devices. It could be as simple as emails, but it could be data associated with a business application.

In my last blog, I talked a bit about how network access control (NAC) can effectively augment and modernize existing IT-GRC programs by ensuring the integrity of the host-based controls they depend on. If you follow that line of thinking, you can easily see how NAC can be applied to enhance other important security and management process throughout the IT organization. In particular, extending the value of security information and event management (SIEM), vulnerability assessment and policy and configuration management tools with NAC can establish a healthy ecosystem that utilizes components more effectively offering an overall more cohesive unit.

With the smorgasbord of compliance and governance mandates putting pressure on enterprises today, many companies have mapped tools and controls across industry and regulatory compliance frameworks to more efficiently institute governance, risk and compliance (IT-GRC) best practices.

Next week, ForeScout will launch the first of this year’s Best Practice Seminars.  These two-day conferences are designed to offer ForeScout users a forum to not only find out more about driving the highest possible value from their CounterACT deployments, but also to review the latest trends related to network security. 

I recently penned a byline for SC Magazine on the dangers of enterprises sticking their head in the sand and ignoring the BYOD trend, and I am sharing it here with readers of the ForeScout blog.