Are You Getting the Most from Security Software Already Deployed on Endpoints?
by Eirik Iverson, Product Management
Many perceive anti-virus software as providing ‘fire and forget’ endpoint protection. It does not!
Many factors can interfere with the proper operation of these and other security tools such as anti-spyware, personal firewalls, and disk encryption.
Consequently, IT personnel must have a means to monitor the state and activity of these tools to determine:
• Is it running?
• Are protective services enabled?
• Is the software up-to-date?
For signature (a.k.a., fingerprints) based tools such as anti-virus and anti-spyware:
• Are signatures up-to-date?
• Is it conducting a ‘full scan’ frequently enough?
End-users, software patches, other software installations, and sometimes malware can stop these tools from running or disable them. Default settings do not always automatically download and install software updates. As a rule of thumb, a survey of an endpoint population will typically reveal that 5% to 20% of them do not have their client security software running and enabled.
Even more common, however, signatures for anti-virus and anti-spyware agents are often out-of-date by days or weeks. These days, hackers can create dozens of variants of previously known malware that require new signatures to be stopped by anti-virus and anti-spyware agents. These variants can be generated in minutes by hackers with ordinary skill levels. So, signatures should never be more than 48 hours old. Frankly, they should be less than 12 hours young, or younger.
With regard to the frequency of signature updates, consumer anti-virus and anti-spyware may actually be superior to enterprise equivalents. This is because the enterprise typically purchases a server from the vendor that relays all signature updates to the clients from the vendor. Default settings for client agent signature updates may exclusively rely on these servers for updates. Why should the anti-virus and anti-spyware servers be in the loop at all for signature updates? If an agent must go through them, does that mean they must logically connect to the corporate LAN to get signature updates? Does that mean off-enterprise endpoints could go days or weeks without signature updates? Yes it does! Fortunately, most of these products allow agents to get their signature and product updates directly from the vendor. Make certain your anti-virus and anti-spyware products are configured in this manner.
Perhaps the most overlooked information security requirement in the enterprise concerns how often anti-virus and anti-spyware agents perform a ‘full scan’ of their respective host. A typical enterprise will find that the frequency for ‘full scans’ are measured in weeks not days.
Wait a minute, if both anti-virus and anti-spyware capabilities are enabled, why should one care about ‘full scans’? The answer is simple. If you were to prompt your anti-virus agent to check for signature updates right now and it downloaded some new signatures, then you would know that none of the files in your endpoint have ever been scanned with respect to those new signatures. So, opening any document or media file in the endpoint could potentially trigger the most awful malware infestation ever imagined. Malware payloads might lay dormant for days or weeks before their required trigger, such as opening an email attachment. Even if already triggered, and if the endpoint is already infested, if a ‘full scan’ finds the original malware payload because the hacker foolishly neglected to delete it, you would at least know that the endpoint may be untrustworthy.
Why should anyone care about the above? The answer is disturbing. Today’s sophisticated malware is all the more likely undetectable to whatever tools are available and familiar to typical desktop administrators. Such software can steal intellectual property, sensitive customer data, internal financial information, end-user credentials to mission critical servers, attack those servers, and spread malware to other endpoints. All this can generate bad press, regulatory investigations, loss of customer/partner confidence, increase IT operations costs, and slow down business processes. Clearly, with malware increasingly undetectable and lethal to an organization, prevention is critical. So, are you getting the most out of your anti-virus deployment?
