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How FireMon Can Help You Integrate Privacy into Your Business Foundation

As organizations increasingly rely on technology to streamline operations and connect with customers, the need for robust privacy measures has become more critical than ever. Here at FireMon, we play a pivotal role in building a privacy-centric organization by seamlessly integrating privacy into the very foundation of your business. 

Understanding the Privacy Landscape 

Before delving into the specifics of FireMon’s capabilities, it’s crucial to grasp the current privacy landscape. Data breaches, cyber threats, and regulatory requirements have heightened the awareness of privacy concerns. Customers are more discerning about the protection of their personal information, and regulators are tightening the screws on organizations that fail to meet privacy standards. 

FireMon’s Role in Privacy Integration 

1. Comprehensive Visibility

Building a privacy-centric organization starts with understanding your digital environment. FireMon provides comprehensive visibility into your network, enabling you to identify and assess potential privacy risks. By mapping out your network architecture, you gain insights into data flows, potential vulnerabilities, and areas where privacy measures need reinforcement. 

2. Policy Management and Enforcement

Effective privacy management requires robust policies and their consistent enforcement. FireMon excels in policy management, allowing organizations to define and implement privacy policies seamlessly. With a centralized single-source of truth platform, you can monitor and enforce policies across your entire network infrastructure, ensuring that privacy measures are consistently applied. 

3. Continuous Compliance Monitoring

Privacy regulations are dynamic and subject to change. FireMon aids in maintaining continuous compliance by regularly updating its database with the latest privacy regulations and standards. This ensures that your organization stays ahead of regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties. 

4. Automated Risk Assessment

Identifying and mitigating privacy risks manually can be a daunting task. FireMon’s automation capabilities streamline the risk assessment process. By leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning, FireMon identifies potential privacy risks in real-time, allowing your organization to proactively address vulnerabilities and enhance overall privacy posture. 

5. Incident Response and Forensics

Despite robust preventive measures, incidents can still occur. FireMon provides robust incident response and forensics capabilities, allowing organizations to investigate and mitigate the impact of privacy incidents swiftly. By tracing the origins of a breach and understanding its scope, your organization can take decisive action to minimize the fallout and uphold customer trust. 

Example: Privacy Success with FireMon 

To illustrate the impact of integrating FireMon into your organization’s privacy framework, let’s explore a hypothetical instance. A financial institution, subject to stringent privacy regulations, implemented FireMon to enhance its privacy posture. 

Through comprehensive visibility, the institution identified previously unnoticed data flows and vulnerabilities within its network. With FireMon’s policy management, the organization defined and enforced robust privacy policies, ensuring that customer data was consistently protected. 

Continuous compliance monitoring proved invaluable as privacy regulations evolved. FireMon’s automated risk assessment flagged potential vulnerabilities, allowing the institution to proactively address issues and maintain a strong privacy stance. 

Building a privacy-centric organization is not a one-time endeavor but an ongoing commitment to safeguarding sensitive information. FireMon emerges as a key ally in this journey, providing the tools and capabilities needed to integrate privacy seamlessly into your business foundation. 

By leveraging FireMon’s comprehensive visibility, policy management, continuous compliance monitoring, automated risk assessment, and incident response capabilities, organizations can navigate the complex privacy landscape with confidence. As technology continues to advance and privacy concerns intensify, embracing solutions like FireMon becomes imperative for organizations aspiring to uphold the highest standards of privacy and security. 

As Australia has grown increasingly connected, the security of critical infrastructure has never been more paramount. In response to the evolving threat landscape, the Australian government enacted the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act (SOCI) in 2018. While the act was designed to strengthen Australia’s national security posture, it has undoubtedly introduced additional challenges for organisations that fall under its jurisdiction.

One of the key obligations of the SOCI Act is “the requirement to report information to the Register of Critical Infrastructure Assets”. For CISOs and Network Security Leads, ensuring compliance while also maintaining a strong security posture can be a complex task.

The Challenge: Accurate and Comprehensive Reporting

The SOCI Act mandates that organisations provide comprehensive, accurate, and timely information about their critical infrastructure assets. This requirement ensures that the government can respond effectively to threats and is equipped with the knowledge needed to protect the nation’s vital services.

However, achieving a comprehensive overview of networked assets is not always straightforward. Many organisations have complex, distributed networks that have grown organically over time. Without a clear view of every connected asset, not only is there an increased security risk, but there’s also the potential for non-compliance with the SOCI Act, leading to severe fines and penalties.

The Solution: Asset Visibility

When maintaining SOCI compliance whilst protecting your organisation from cybercrime, the first step is to fully understand your environment and all that needs to be secured. You cannot protect what you cannot see. It sounds simple enough, but mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, and even onboarding remote new hires can significantly and rapidly expand your security team’s responsibilities. If you are not equipped to properly identify, manage, and secure your new assets, they become an immediate liability.

In addition to improved compliance, asset visibility solutions provide multiple benefits, including:

• Comprehensive Visibility: Cyber asset visibility tools automatically scan and map out every connected device within an organisation’s infrastructure. This ensures that no asset remains hidden, offering a clear, bird’s-eye view of the entire network.
• Up-to-Date Information: Network landscapes change frequently. Devices are added or retired, configurations are altered, and networks are restructured. An effective asset visibility tool will update the asset inventory in real-time, ensuring that the information provided to the Register of Critical Infrastructure Assets is always current.
• Risk Identification: Beyond just identifying assets, modern network discovery solutions can also help identify vulnerabilities or misconfigurations. By tying these insights into the reporting process, organisations can proactively address security risks before they’re exploited.
• Efficient Reporting: With a centralized dashboard that presents all discovered assets and their respective details, compiling reports for the SOCI becomes a straightforward task. No more manual checks or missed devices; everything is right at your fingertips.

Facing Audits and Fines with Confidence

Since the SOCIs Act’s introduction, organisations are now facing stringent audits and potential fines for non-compliance. By leveraging a robust asset visibility solution, CISOs and Network Security Leads can approach these audits with confidence, knowing they have a reliable and up-to-date record of their assets.

Conclusion

In the age of increasing cyber threats, having a clear understanding of your networked assets is not just a matter of compliance but also a cornerstone of a robust cybersecurity strategy.

By embracing advanced asset visibility tools, organisations can not only meet their SOCI obligations but also identify unknown assets, improve response times, achieve continuous monitoring, and strengthen your security posture. Without complete asset visibility, your organization is at risk of cyberattacks that could lead to data breaches, reputational damage, and financial losses. Therefore, it’s essential to invest in tools and processes that provide asset visibility and continuously monitor your network for potential threats.

FireMon’s Asset Manager, formerly Lumeta, is a real-time network visibility solution that monitors an organization’s entire environment for anomalies, potential threats, and compliance violations. It continuously scans and discovers the entire network infrastructure for every device and connection including firewalls, routers, end points, and cloud devices. Other asset discovery tools require a person to initiate asset discovery searches, wasting precious time and leaving assets vulnerable.

Asset Manager has been around for over 22 years and is used by many Fortune 500 companies. It is largely recognized for its consistency, scalability, and reliability. On average, Asset Manager finds 30% more assets than our competitors, which are potentially thousands of unprotected devices waiting to become an attack vector for cybercriminals.

To learn more about how we can help your organisation meet its SOCI obligations and bolster its security, get in touch with us today.

Two years ago, FireMon elevated its game by introducing real-time features in our Cloud Defense platform. This was a significant development because it transformed our tool from a basic safety checker into a full-fledged cloud security guardian. Real-time capability is crucial for advancing tools from basic vulnerability assessment to a comprehensive cloud security operations platform. However, our journey towards real-time was not driven by customer requests; rather, it was motivated by our commitment to delivering improved efficiency and enhanced security operations.

Why We Built Real-Time:

Our initial goal was not to create a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool. We began by building a cloud security automation platform with the aim of helping organizations address cloud security vulnerabilities more rapidly and bridging the gap between security and DevOps/Cloud Operations. While this may seem like a subtle distinction, it meant that we entered the CSPM market with a different perspective.

• Inefficiency of time-based scans: Initially, like everyone else, we relied on time-based scans. However, they proved to be slow, even when distributed, and could potentially exceed a customer’s service limits.
• Stale data: Periodic scans resulted in customers viewing outdated information. Even scanning every 15 minutes could lead to alerting a development team about something they had already resolved.
• Real-time nature of security operations: Responders need to have real-time awareness of events, alerts, and configurations.
• Efficiency for us: It’s not selfish to consider that dealing with timing and capacity planning in a multi-tenant system becomes challenging when everything is time-based.

This isn’t to say that time-based scans don’t have their place; we still use them for our Free tier, and we perform daily sweeps for all our Pro accounts to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.

Building Real-Time (The AWS Way):

Today, we will focus on how we enable real-time functionality for AWS. In future posts, we will provide details on how we implement it for Azure and GCP. We underwent several iterations, and thanks to AWS, the system we have now is remarkably efficient.

• EventBridge to Lambda to API: Initially, we forwarded events from EventBridge to an API gateway through a Lambda function deployed in customer environments. It worked but was not highly efficient.
• EventBridge to… EventBridge: AWS enhanced EventBridge, allowing customers to send events directly to us. Now, all we needed to do was deploy an EventBridge Rule in customer accounts. We didn’t even require special authentication because the AWS event headers are tamper-proof, and we discard anything not associated with a customer.
• Updating on change: We keep track of changes such as updates and deletions, capturing resource details. This initiates an update in our Discoverer service for that specific item.
• Trigger chain: The update hits the Inventory, and any change here triggers the Lambda functions for checks. All checks for a specific type of resource occur simultaneously, and findings are evaluated against alert and remediation rules.
• Instant alerts: This setup triggers an alert (or automated remediation) within just 5-15 seconds after a change, and all parts of the system are updated with consistent data (e.g., compliance). Most customers send alerts to ChatOps (Slack/Teams), but they can also send them via email, create a JIRA ticket, or forward them to a SIEM.

Real-Time Benefits:

Transitioning to real-time elevated Cloud Defense, finally enabling security operations as we had always envisioned. Without real-time capability, CSPM tools are essentially just another type of vulnerability scanner. There’s nothing wrong with vulnerability scanners; we use them ourselves. However, since cloud misconfigurations can become exposed to the internet instantly, we believe the response cycle needs to be much tighter.

• Up-to-date inventory: With real-time functionality, what you see in Cloud Defense accurately reflects the current configuration of your AWS account.
• Immediate checks: Security and compliance checks occur as changes are made, promptly identifying misconfigurations. You won’t be left exposed for 15 minutes to 24 hours, which is the scanning frequency of time-based tools.
• Complete understanding of changes: Cloud Defense tracks the API that triggered the change, the identity responsible for the API call, and the impact on the resource (including changes and check results) from start to finish. This comprehensive tracking allows for change tracking, examination of other API calls from the same IAM entity, exploration of resources connected to the affected resource, and other powerful analysis capabilities.
• Enabling security operations: With Cloud Defense, you gain insight into who made a change, when it was made, the security implications, and the ability to filter and forward information to facilitate rapid remediation, whether manual or automated. No more emailing spreadsheets. This transformation elevates the platform into a complete operational tool.

Our Cloud Defense platform demonstrates how real-time CSPM should be done. From our initial days of time-based scans to the swift transition to real-time monitoring, we have enhanced your ability to use CSPM as a security operations tool and introduced new methods of safeguarding your cloud deployments. Adding real-time capability to Cloud Defense was not just about a flashy feature; it was a game-changer in making cloud security robust, quick, and reliable.