In this latest post of our series on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, we’ll explain how file integrity monitoring (FIM) can be crucial in helping organizations comply with this severe regulation.

GDPR, which went into effect in May and applies to organizations worldwide that handle EU residents’ personal data, provides few details of specific security technologies and processes organizations should adopt.

However, it’s clear from the GDPR text that the regulators expect organizations to demonstrate that  they’re doing all they can to protect their EU customers’ personal data from malicious and accidental misuse. For InfoSec teams this means providing a rock-solid security foundation that gives their organizations superior data breach prevention and detection.

File integrity monitoring (FIM) specifically provides security controls in three key areas for GDPR:

• Ensuring integrity of data stored in filesystems
• Protecting confidentiality of data by detecting changes to filesystem access controls
• Detecting breaches 

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In prior installments of this GDPR compliance blog series, we’ve discussed the importance of key security practices such as IT asset inventory and vulnerability management. Today, we’ll focus on another core component for GDPR: policy compliance.

As we’ve stated before, to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), organizations must show they’re doing all they can to protect their EU customers’ personal data. Thus, InfoSec teams must provide a rock-solid security foundation that gives organizations superior data breach prevention and detection.

With a strong IT policy compliance program, organizations can deploy and manage their IT environment according to applicable government regulations, industry standards and internal requirements.

For organizations, it’s critical to establish a lifecycle for managing assets and controls to protect the data they contain. One must continuously: identify IT assets and scope, define control objectives, automate control assessment, prioritize fixes, and ultimately remediate the security configuration problems.

To be effective, this entire process must be trackable by auditors and must maintain the proper reports and dashboards necessary to drive continuous improvement. Organizations must have this knowledge not only to properly protect their EU customers’ personal data — the regulation’s core goal — but also to comply with other GDPR requirements.

After gaining complete visibility into their IT assets, organizations can create data maps and decide which technical controls it needs to secure EU residents’ personal data in a way that meets GDPR’s considerable expectations and strict requirements.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from OS and application vendors and other industry best practices.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

This release includes the following new policy and updates:

• CID 3777 and 3781 will be removed in 30 days and have newer replacement controls.
• CIS Benchmark coverage for Network Devices including Cisco Firewall ASA, Palo Alto Firewall, Cisco NX-OS, JunOS 12/13
• CIS for Oracle 11gR2, 12c, and Microsoft Windows 10 r1607/r1703
• Adobe Common Controls Framework for Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Refresh of several DISA STIG and CIS Benchmarks to latest versions
• Updated control settings in mandate-based policies

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File integrity monitoring, like other foundational security practices such as vulnerability management, helps organizations comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). FIM specifically provides security controls in three key areas for GDPR:

• Ensuring integrity of data stored in filesystems
• Protecting confidentiality of data by detecting changes to filesystem access controls
• Detecting breaches  

Qualys File Integrity Monitoring’s ability to quickly detect changes in all of these cases makes it a critical tool that helps you meet general security requirements of GDPR. This regulation goes into effect in late May and applies to any organization worldwide that handles personal data of EU residents.

What is FIM, anyway?

File integrity monitoring systems can help you to promptly detect a variety of changes stemming from normal IT activities, compliance and change control violations, or malicious acts such as malware attacks and configuration tampering.  FIM systems use snapshot data and real time detection on the endpoints to identify when files on a system are changed, and when necessary, log the file changes so system administrators, compliance teams, and incident response teams can verify the events and determine if the activity was normal, a policy violation, or a sign of compromise.

Aside from compliance and breach detection use cases, FIM can be invaluable in making sure scripts used for automation and critical application configurations are not changed without proper change control and approval. That way, organizations can prevent downtime and enable fast recovery, both key to ensuring availability of critical applications.

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This new release of the Qualys Cloud Platform (VM, PC), version 8.13, includes several new feature improvements across the apps such as the ability to test authentication records, as well as improvements to UDC’s and report options in Qualys Policy Compliance.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from vendors such as Microsoft and VMware.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

This release includes the following new policies and updates:

• New CIS policy for Palo Alto Firewall 7 and Microsoft Windows 10 Enterprise Release 1607
• New mandate-based policies Adobe Common Controls Framework for Microsoft Windows, and HITRUST for VMware & Network Devices
• Several updates to existing library policies

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You’ll be hard pressed to find file integrity monitoring on any list of cool, emerging, cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies. But if you choose to ignore this mature, foundational technology, it’ll be at great risk.

File integrity monitoring, or FIM, plays a key role in critical security and compliance scenarios. An effective FIM system can help you to promptly detect a variety of changes stemming from normal IT activity, compliance and change control violations, or malicious acts such as ransomware/malware attacks and configuration tampering. FIM can be your last line of detection for complex and evasive rootkits or mobile code. It is also invaluable in making sure validated scripts and configurations are not changed by insiders, malicious or not.

In this blog series, we’ll address the major uses for FIM, starting with regulatory compliance, and specifically the PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) mandate.

While FIM is an implicitly required control in many regulations for ensuring information integrity, it is explicitly mentioned in PCI DSS for any system handling personally identifiable information.  The best practices and insights from those monitoring systems with FIM for PCI compliance are just as applicable to other regulations and mandates, such as HIPAA, GDPR and Sarbanes-Oxley.

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This new release of the Qualys Cloud Suite, version 8.12 adds new reporting options for the PC Report, allowing you to include new summaries in the remediation section of the report for control failures.

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Qualys’ library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from vendors such as Microsoft and VMware.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

This release includes the following new policies and updates:

• New CIS policies for Internet Explorer and Chrome on Windows, Apache Tomcat, RHEL, Windows 10, Sybase ASE, and MongoDB
• New DISA STIG policies for Internet Explorer 10 and 11
• New Best Practice & Mandate Policies for SAP ASE 16 and HiTRUST CSF on Linux
• Several updates to existing library policies

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The Qualys library of built-in policies makes it easy to comply with the security standards and regulations that are most commonly used and adhered to. Qualys provides a wide range of policies, including many that have been certified by CIS as well as the ones based on security guidelines from vendors such as Microsoft and VMware.

In order to keep up with the latest changes in security control requirements and new technologies, Qualys publishes new content to the Policy Library every month.

This release includes the following new policies and updates:

• New CIS benchmarks for Docker
• New policies for USGCB for Microsoft Windows
• New best practice controls for reducing risk related to malware/ransomware
• Several updates to existing Mandate-based, CIS and DISA STIG Policies

Continue reading …