Qualys Blog

Anyone questioning the importance of IT asset visibility in an organization’s security and compliance postures ought to review the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which goes into effect next year.

With the severe requirements the GDPR places on how a business handles the personal data of EU residents, it’s clear a comprehensive IT asset inventory is a must for compliance.

Specifically, companies must know what personally identifiable information (PII) they hold on these individuals, where it’s stored, with whom they’re sharing it, how they’re protecting it, and for what purposes it’s being used.

In this second installment of our blog series on GDPR readiness, we’ll explain how organizations need full visibility into all hardware and software involved in the processing, transmission, analysis and storage of this PII data, so they’re able to protect it and account for it as required by the regulation.

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It didn’t have to happen.

That’s the simple yet profound lesson from WannaCry’s ransomware rampage that has infected 300,000-plus systems in more than 150 countries, disrupting critical operations across industries, including healthcare, government, transportation and finance.

If vulnerable systems had been patched and maintained as part of a proactive and comprehensive system configuration and vulnerability management program, the attack would have been a dud, barely registering on anyone’s InfoSec radar.

“WannaCry was totally preventable with the proper patching and the proper build configurations,” Mark Butler, Qualys’ Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), said during a webcast this week. “That’s a reminder to all of us that you didn’t have to be a victim.”

There are various workarounds for mitigating the underlying WannaCry vulnerability, but those are stopgap measures. “The primary way to remediate this vulnerability is through disciplined and timely patching,” Qualys Product Management Director Jimmy Graham said during the webcast, titled “How to Rapidly Identify Assets at Risk to WannaCry Ransomware.”

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The looming deadline for complying with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is shining the spotlight on a foundational InfoSec best practice: A comprehensive IT asset inventory.

The reason: GDPR places strict requirements on the way a business handles the personally identifiable information (PII) of EU residents. For example, companies must know what PII they hold on these individuals, where it’s kept, with whom they’re sharing it, how they’re protecting it, and for what purposes it’s being used.

An organization can’t expect to comply with GDPR if it lacks full visibility into the IT assets — hardware and software — that it’s using to process, transmit, analyze and store this data.

“If you don’t know what IT assets you’ve got, how can you effectively find the data on your network that you need to meet GDPR requirements?” said Darron Gibbard, Qualys’ Chief Technical Security Officer for the EMEA region, during a recent webcast.

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A major challenge for enterprise InfoSec teams is keeping their finger on the pulse of two constantly changing elements: external cyber threats and internal technology needs.

Staying a step ahead and proactively adjusting their organization’s security posture accordingly is a must in order to keep attack risks as low as possible. So what are the major shifts in threats and business technology use that CISOs and their staff face in 2017? And how should they respond to these changes?

You will find comprehensive answers to those and other critical InfoSec questions in a new SANS Institute whitepaper written by security analyst John Pescatore.

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As we’ve discussed in this blog series on automated IT asset inventory, having — or regaining — unobstructed visibility of your IT environment is key for a strong security and compliance posture.

We met Max, the CISO of a large manufacturer, whose organization progressively lost this visibility, as it adopted cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, IoT and other digital transformation technologies.

With the company’s IT environment upended and its network perimeter blurred, Max and the InfoSec team recovered control with a cloud-based, automated IT asset inventory system. This successful solution featured six key elements. In the previous posts, we addressed the first three:

• Complete visibility of your IT environment
• Deep visibility into assets, wherever they reside
• Continuous and automatic updates

This means that you need a complete and continuously updated list of IT assets, as well as granular security, compliance and system details on each one.

In this post, we’ll explain the next two requirements for an effective cloud-based IT asset inventorying system:

• Asset criticality rankings
• Dashboarding and reporting

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In the first installment of this blog series on automated asset inventorying, we met Max, the CISO of a large manufacturer whose InfoSec team lost full visibility of the company’s hardware and software.

Dangerous blind spots appeared progressively over time as Max’s company adopted more and more digital transformation technologies, such as cloud computing, mobility, IoT, and virtualization.

Eventually, Max and his team became alarmed at the inability of their legacy on-premises security products to account for the new cloud instances, virtualized environments, mobile endpoints and other assets outside of the traditional, tightly-controlled network perimeter.

They were concerned that this lack of visibility could lead to an increase in employee use of unapproved personal devices and unauthorized software, as well as to data breaches.

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Several years ago, Max, the CISO of a large manufacturer, realized that his organization’s formerly homogeneous, self-contained IT environment had lost its clearly delineated perimeter. Instead, it had become a hybrid environment with blurred borders, made up of a mix of legacy on-premises systems, new cloud workloads, and a variety of mobile endpoints.

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With 2017 still in its infancy, plenty of time remains for InfoSec practitioners to make concrete strides toward better security and compliance in their organizations. That’s why to help you start off the year on the right foot, we’ve shared best practices, ideas and recommendations in our Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017 blog series.

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A new year has started, giving InfoSec professionals the perfect opportunity to evaluate what’s working and what’s not in their organizations, and, filled with that early-January optimism, set out to do better.

In that spirit of improvement and renewal, Qualys is kicking off today a blog series that outlines helpful tips — not just flimsy resolutions — for ensuring data security and compliance throughout the year.

In this initial post, we’ll discuss the first three of the Qualys Top 10 Tips for a Secure & Compliant 2017, addressing the importance of IT asset visibility, proper management of vulnerabilities, and continuous monitoring.

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This release of the Qualys Cloud Platform 2.11 includes new features for the Qualys AssetView Service – a service that lets your company search for information across your entire environment, scaling to millions of assets for organizations of all sizes. Qualys AssetView provides search capabilities for multiple data sources in your environment, including data from: Free Inventory with Qualys Cloud Agent, optional VM or PC features of Cloud Agent, and also agentless scan sources.  This feature replaces the Asset Management module in your account once enabled, and can be activated by contacting your Technical Account Manager or Technical Support.

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