Johannesburg, 13 Jul 2017
Varonis Systems (NASDAQ:VRNS), a leading provider of software solutions that protect data from insider threats and cyber attacks, announced the release of the Varonis Automation Engine, new threat models within DatAlert and DatAlert Analytics Rewind: advanced forensic intelligence that allows customers to analyse past user and data activity.
Now available in beta, Version 6.3.170 of the Data Security Platform (DSP) introduces the Automation Engine that automatically finds and fixes some of the most dangerous file system security issues so that organisations are less vulnerable to attacks, more compliant and consistently enforcing a least privilege model.
"A common misconception about data breaches is that they are sophisticated attacks, but in reality they are frequently opportunistic, where insiders or attackers that have bypassed perimeter defences take advantage of excessive user access through global groups. In the recent Varonis Data Risk Report, we found that 20% of all folders on average within an organisation were open to every employee, and in 47% of the cases analysed, at least 1 000 files containing sensitive data and falling under compliance regulations like POPI, PCI, HIPAA or GDPR were open to all users," said Ken Spinner, VP of Field Engineering at Varonis. "We are excited to launch the Automation Engine to help organisations close a serious audit gap and reduce an attacker's ability to exploit misconfigured permissions hidden many levels down in a directory tree."
"Terrorists, spies and crooks motivated by money and malice are in pursuit of intellectual property or damaging personal information and exploit vulnerabilities in companies' information systems," said John P. Carlin, former Assistant Attorney General for National Security and current Chair of Morrison & Foerster LLP's Global Risk and Crisis Management Group. "Companies have to prepare to mitigate risk from a breach by safeguarding sensitive files and eliminating unnecessary access. The Varonis Data Risk Report highlights what I have seen in government and in private practice: that too many companies and governments today are relying on firewalls and not taking basic steps to reduce risk once the bad guy is inside the perimeter. We need to get better at this if we hope to keep pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape and defend against increasingly sophisticated actors."
Organisations must address global access - access that includes every user and service account in the organisation - and fix inconsistent Access Control Lists (ACLs) in order to eliminate unnecessary access. A manual remediation project of these two issues that does not disrupt employee productivity requires at least three to six hours of work per misconfigured folder. With the Automation Engine, customers will be able to automatically remediate entire servers - thousands of shares and folders - in minutes after initial setup.
The Varonis Automation Engine:
* Discovers and automatically repairs broken and over-permissive access controls;
* Automatically fixes hidden vulnerabilities that hackers and insider threats will exploit, such as overly accessible confidential files that can be accessed by everyone, without introducing business disruption; and
* Safely automates necessary remediation steps to achieve and sustain a least-privilege model, where employees only have access to files they need to do their jobs
Other highlights of the upcoming release:
* DatAlert Analytics Rewind allows customers to analyse past user and data activity to identify attacks that may have occurred in the past and pre-emptively tune out false positives;
* New DatAlert Threat Models detect suspicious mailbox and Exchange behaviours, password resets and unusual activity from personal devices; and
* Support for NetApp ONTAP Cloud Data Storage.
Additional Resources
* Watch a video to learn about the benefits of the Varonis Automation Engine: https://www.varonis.com/products/automation-engine.
* For more information on Varonis' solution portfolio, please visit www.varonis.com.
* Visit our blog and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Podcast and YouTube.
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