21 October 2024
How Open-AudIT Aligns With Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Learn how you can improve your security posture with FirstWave’s powerful discovery and auditing tool.
As business networks grow and modernize, attack surfaces continue to increase, leaving more opportunities for bad actors to strike. According to Forrester, “two years ago, 63% [of organizations] said they had been breached at least once in the past year. This year, that number rose to 78%.”
Every October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month is the perfect opportunity to review and strengthen your security posture, preventing your business from becoming a statistic. The theme for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2024 is “Cybersecurity is everyone’s business”. As part of this theme, governments and cybersecurity authorities are promoting four key focus areas:
- Turn on multi-factor authentication
- Keep devices and software up to date
- Use strong and unique passwords
- Recognize and report phishing.
Some of these focus areas are straightforward, but others—like keeping devices and software up to date—become more difficult to achieve as your network expands. In this blog, we’ll look at how using a comprehensive discovery, auditing, and compliance tool like Open-AudIT makes it easy for you to audit your devices and software from end to end – plus so much more.
About Open-AudIT
Do you really know everything that’s connected to your network beyond computers? Do you know who has access to what, and which software programs are installed on different devices? What if you could get all of this information in one tool?
Each device on your network forms part of your attack surface; the more you expand, the larger that attack surface becomes. But Open-AudIT gives you complete visibility and control of your network, enabling you to identify gaps in your network and secure it from end to end.
With intelligent discovery, auditing, and compliance features, Open-AudIT gives you immediate access to software licensing, configuration changes, non-authorized devices, capacity utilization, hardware warranty status reports, and more. Plus, the software is free to use (with the option to purchase additional feature sets).
How Open-AudIT improves your cybersecurity
You can use Open-AudIT to do more than just keep your devices and software up to date; you can use its intelligent features to meet a range of security controls and protect your network.
Accurate device discovery
Open-AudIT’s discovery feature identifies every device on your network, giving your security team full visibility and helping you meet system inventory controls. By keeping an accurate inventory of all your systems and devices you can effectively manage security risks, patch vulnerabilities, and respond to incidents quickly.
- Scheduled discoveries automatically discover all network-connected devices, including any unauthorized or unknown devices that could pose security risks, as well as identifying potential threats.
- You can also run an unscheduled discovery by setting the parameters of what you want to interrogate (for example, an IP address range) and running a search to see everything on your network that fits within these parameters.
- If you want to see everything, you can run a seed discovery. This is where Open-AudIT discovers all connected devices connected to a single “seed” router, continuing to run subsequent discoveries until you have a complete picture of every device on your network.
Extensive asset management reports
Open-AudIT collects massive amounts of data—including user permissions, software versions, serial numbers, and IP addresses—to give you access to over 80 types of reports, making it easy to meet asset management controls. Use these reports to maintain current device configuration records, keep security patches up to date, identify unapproved devices, quickly isolate compromised devices, and keep compliance with security policies.
Software license auditing
Outdated or unsupported software leaves you susceptible to cyberattacks. Open-AudIT keeps a detailed log of installed software to help you ensure that only authorized versions are present and that your systems are up to date.
Continuous monitoring for shadow IT
Open-AudIT helps you identify unauthorized devices or malicious activities on your network, known as shadow IT, through continuous network monitoring. Detecting these abnormalities is essential for ensuring only authorized devices are communicating over your network, meeting critical security controls and protecting your business.
Change tracking
Open-AudIT tracks changes to specific device attributes, including installed software, hardware, and settings, for easy auditing and change management. FirstWave’s opConfig also supports comprehensive configuration change tracking for network devices with a CLI-targeted inventory.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Open-AudIT gives you granular control over user permissions, helping you filter and limit access to sensitive network data within the platform. This reduces the risk of insider threats by ensuring that only authorized personnel can modify or view critical network information.
Configuration benchmarks and compliance
Open-AudIT can compare device, software, and user configurations against pre-defined benchmarks. This helps you spot deviations that could signal a vulnerability or misconfiguration, helping you resolve them quickly. Open-AudIT’s scheduled scans also help detect any changes in device configurations, ensuring compliance with security protocols and alerting users to potential risks before they escalate.
If you use Open-AudIT Enterprise, you can even set custom benchmarks to help you achieve compliance for both internal and industry security standards. You can either custom-define your own benchmarks based on your organization’s internal compliance requirements, or you can access a huge variety of benchmark lists for different industries – like HIPAA, NIST SP 800-171, or PCI DSS.
FirstWave: a leader in cybersecurity
Since 2004, FirstWave has been delivering one of the only cybersecurity solutions of its kind to global customers. Today, we’re a market leader with over 150,000 customers worldwide.
Where competitors focus on getting more customers and generating more revenue, we focus on optimizing our products and supporting our end-users. Many of the developers on our small team have been at FirstWave and in the cybersecurity industry for many years; some have even been with us since our inception. As a result our product suite is not only rich in features, but also comes with unmatched support from our dedicated team.
It doesn’t end with Open-AudIT
If you want to take your network security a step further, FirstWave helps businesses fortify their security postures with other solutions like:
- CyberCision™: Our advanced security management platform allows service providers to grow revenue by provisioning cybersecurity services at a reduced cost. CyberCision’s email security and web protection features can also help protect your organization from phishing – another key focus area of this year’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month.
- STM (Secure Traffic Manager): This intelligence-driven platform provides real-time traffic visibility and control, so you can turn off traffic from bad links and improve Quality of Service (QoS).
- NMIS (Network Management Information System): NMIS offers comprehensive network management and handles faults, performance, and configurations with ease. There are several NMIS modules that can improve your cybersecurity:
- opConfig: Create baseline configuration rules on any device to support security protection and compliance. Change standards across devices automatically, including running super user commands, to make changes based on insights gleaned from Open-AudIT reports.
- opEvents: Capture security events and set up custom alerts to notify you in real time. Link opEvents to opConfig to create automated actions in response to certain events.
- opCharts: Access everything you could want to know about your network environment through a single pane of glass. Use dashboards, maps, and charts to visualize and combine multiple data sets.
Open-AudIT is used by over 130,000 organizations worldwide for good reason: No other IT auditing software can discover as much as Open-AudIT. There’s no better time than Cybersecurity Awareness Month to review and upgrade your cybersecurity posture, and by integrating Open-AudIT into your enterprise network, your business can proactively protect itself from cyberthreats.