Continuous Monitoring

Real-time risk management as a lifestyle

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Overview

Continuous diagnostics and mitigation streamlines costly security operations to help senior federal officials gain greater visibility into their organization’s security health and precise information for continuous risk management.

Move from static to dynamic — Most organizations have baseline capabilities in core processes such as antivirus updates , operating system, and application patching assessment, along with SCAP-enabled products to evaluate FDCC/USGCB compliance. With continuous monitoring (also called continuous diagnostics and mitigation, or CDM), the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Continuous Asset Evaluation, Situational Awareness, and Risk Scoring (CAESARS) Reference Architecture and Framework Extension (FE) expands the focus of security efforts from point compliance to an ecosystem of dynamic resilience – as you detect, you report, respond in real-time.

Apply the latest intelligence, context, and risk — McAfee makes it easy to add real-time asset discovery and vulnerability management, intelligence-driven response, and continuous feedback to meet changing federal requirements. Open interfaces and standard protocols help agencies integrate new and legacy systems at minimal cost. The system collects data from ongoing processes, correlates against multiple contextual factors, takes action automatically where appropriate, and presents the remaining issues in priority order. The most important and at-risk assets receive the most immediate and significant attention.

Invest for mission assurance — A continuous monitoring program built on McAfee conserves government resources and reduces the chance of network disruption. The larger and more distributed the team, the greater the operational value from an accurate, contextual picture of risk, preventative and automated controls, and a centralized monitoring and management system that can scale, adapt, and overcome new risks — continuously.

Key Benefits

  • Leverage an open platform and standards to create your CAESARS architecture
    The component-based Security Connected platform from McAfee maximizes compatibility, agility, and ROI while minimizing integration, management, and maintenance costs. McAfee leverages existing USGCB/FDCC compliance and SCAP support and pre-integrates products spanning the security technologies listed as “required” by CAESARS: task management, collection sensors, databases, presentation/reporting systems, and analysis/risk scoring. Plus, more than 120 partners “plug and play” through the McAfee platform to let you secure and manage your environment your way.
  • Maintain an accurate picture of your organization’s security risk posture
    Shift from static reporting to real-time risk management that helps keep your actual security posture aligned with your intended risk posture and changing threats, assets, and priorities.
  • Gain real-time visibility into hardware assets that drift on and off the network
    Eliminate blind spots and unscanned assets through a combination of passive and active discovery that detects and profiles every system using the network, independent of OS or form factor. Passive scanning monitors traffic to see which devices are alive. Active scanning probes the network to track down idle devices. Together you achieve full and constant visibility.
  • Expose software vulnerabilities based on up-to-date threat intelligence
    Scan for misconfigurations, unpatched and missing software, malware, noncompliance, and potential risk in system software as well as applications, web content, and databases. As vulnerabilities and threats change, the system automatically updates relevant checks to detect the latest issues and recommend fixes.
  • Make your eco system smarter through dynamic event and data correlation
    Correlate data about assets and vulnerabilities with live events taken from global and local intelligence feeds, Secure Content Adaptation Protocol (SCAP) sources, vulnerability research, and CERT alerts on government-specific events.
  • Quantify risk and use context to facilitate real-time decisions
    McAfee solutions can translate your security state into quantified risk scores that factor in current threat intelligence and other context. You can account for countermeasures that could nullify a threat or vulnerability, and use the value of the asset at risk to determine the right response.
  • Automate response to the bulk of events
    Integrated systems and workflows apply local and global threat intelligence at machine speed to address many issues with a new .DAT or patch; thresholds can trigger alerts where humans should intervene.
  • Prioritize human resources for high-impact results
    Shield government staff from event noise so they can focus on: monitoring what they know are the high-impact factors; fine-tuning policies, processes, and controls based on results; investigating subtle and anomalous events; and forensic reporting and diagnosis for root cause analysis and audits.
  • Empower every employee with situational awareness
    Flexible dashboards aggregate and display customized views of real-time status, logs, and data streams from all CAESARS subsystems. Drill-downs facilitate immediate, appropriate action. Unified reporting across systems and data simplifies communication with different team members, auditors, and senior managers.
  • Ensure continued compliance and effectiveness of evolving security controls
    Consistent, comprehensive controls and reporting enable compliance with CAESARS and CAESARS FE and reporting against CIS, DISA STIG, NIST, USGCB/FDCC standards, as well as FISMA, FedRAMP, and CyberScope.

Resources

Solution Briefs

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Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) organizations perform critical incident analysis and handling and information dissemination in support of government, law enforcement, critical infrastructure, and other public sector customers. McAfee understands this mission and offers a number of products and services that enable the core missions of international CERT groups.

Brochures

Security Connected Reference Architecture

Articles

Products

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Community

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Blogs

  • Continuous Monitoring at GFIRST (Part 2)
    Archive - August 23, 2012
    Yesterday I blogged about a presentation I gave at GFIRST in Atlanta, Georgia where I demonstrated a number of application and database attacks and referenced how this is extremely relevant to Continuous Monitoring (CM) for federal agencies. McAfee’s Approach to Continuous Monitoring Risk Awareness Risk awareness across all subsystems enables agencies to understand real-time activities Read more...
  • Continuous Monitoring at GFIRST (Part 1)
    Archive - August 22, 2012
    At GFIRST in Atlanta, Georgia, I just gave an application and database hacking demonstration.  I demonstrated various attacks such as: SQL Injection XSS Session Hijacking Parameter Tampering Database Protocol Hacking I also gave a demonstration of a targeted Phishing attack that brought together Metasploit, Stuxnet, Bit.ly, Facebook…oh, and Cameron Diaz.   These demonstrations were meant Read more...
  • Meeting with the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development
    Archive - August 16, 2012
    A team from the Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett’s Department of Community and Economic Development recently joined us in Silicon Valley at McAfee HQ to discuss information security. Overall, state governments are taking a more proactive stance as is relates to information security; this is a welcome and much needed trend. One of topics we discussed Read more...
  • 10 Days of Rain in Korea
    Archive - July 05, 2011
    On March 4th of this year, exactly 20 months to the day of a similar incident on US Independence Day in 2009, a botnet based out of South Korea launched Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against 40 sites affiliated with South Korean government, military and civilian critical infrastructure as well as U.S. Forces Korea Read more...
  • My Recent Travels to Italy and Spain
    Gert Jan Schenk - May 19, 2011
    Recently I have been meeting with customers and resellers throughout Italy and Spain and it was interesting to hear that their needs from a security partner are very similar to those from the other countries I have recently visited.  I have started to see strong interest in the McAfee DLP, Database Protection and Encryption technologies Read more...
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