Podcast: Focus on What Matters with System Integrity Assurance

DATA SECURITY PODCAST

In a recent podcast interview with Hillarie McClure, Multimedia Director of Cybercrime Magazine,  Robert E. Johnson III, Cimcor CEO/President, discusses the latest views on system integrity assurance and how a system integrity monitoring tool, like CimTrak, can help. The podcast can be listened to in its entirety below.

Welcome to The Data Security Podcast sponsored by Cimcor. Cimcor develops innovative, next-generation file integrity monitoring software. The CimTrak Integrity Suite monitors and protects a wide range of physical, network, cloud, and virtual IT assets in real-time while providing detailed forensic information about all changes. Securing your infrastructure with CimTrak helps you get compliant and stay that way. You can find out more about Cimcor and CimTrak on the web at cimcor.com/cimtrak. 

Q: Joining us today is President and CEO Robert E Johnson, III. Robert has been a pioneer in the development of next-gen system integrity monitoring, self-healing systems, and cybersecurity software. Welcome back, Robert, great to be speaking with you again. 

A: Great to be back on your show, Hillarie. Always fun to join you on this radio show.

Q: So, I like to just dive on in, as you mentioned on our last episode. Let's just hit it hard right from the get-go. We've heard a lot about system integrity assurance lately. So, Robert, I'd love to hear you dive into this with more detail about what it is and why it's so important. 

A: Absolutely, I'd love to dive in. Well, you know, system integrity assurance is the concept of ensuring that your servers, your network devices, cloud infrastructure, and all of those IT components that run your business, and ensure that they're all in an expected and known state. System integrity assurance is really the process of ensuring the integrity of all the files, those logical data structures, configurations, users, and ensure that it's all working according to how your critical systems are defined to behave.

So, we don't want to confuse that with this old-school term of file integrity monitoring or file change detection because that's simply detecting changes. Just anytime which change will occur you'll get a notification. That's useless. System integrity assurance is about much more than files. It's focusing on understanding what's changed across the entire infrastructure, eliminating the noise, and in the end, boiling it down to just the things that matter.

Q: Great, and thank you for that Robert. And if organizations are taking this route of aligning themselves, what are some of the steps that they need to do?

A: Well we've seen many more organizations begin a process of implementing system integrity assurance and implementing it throughout their entire infrastructure. I think this sudden shift is largely related to the current wave of supply chain attacks and this persistent wave of ransomware attacks. You know, currently, it takes an organization, on average, about 206-207 days to even realize they've been hacked, and that's just far too long. That's almost a whole year. And folks are starting to realize that their IDSs, their EDRs, their malware tools, it's just not enough. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in this predicament that we're in right now. So, in the end, security professionals are starting to realize that they need to definitively know if their servers are in an expected state or not, period. They need clarity on that.

So, that type of insight, that definitive declaration of the state of a system can only be provided with the system integrity assurance tool. So, at Cimcor, our resources evolved and focused on helping to build a product that does just that. It's called CimTrak, and we believe it's the most robust system integrity assurance tool out there on the market. In fact, CimTrak's capabilities extend beyond the core definition of system integrity assurance and include some pretty important changes to that basic definition of system integrity assurance. For instance, CimTrak also provides you with insights into changes to system hardening configurations, to insight to changes to database schemas, insights into active directory, and if new users have been changed, and what privileges have they been granted. It carries across the entire IT infrastructure, whether you're in a hybrid type of scenario, or all on the cloud, or on-premise. We even help you understand changes to cloud configurations, and much more. And then, uniquely, CimTrak is the only system integrity assurance tool on the market that includes the ability to do robust remediation and rollback capabilities. Our objective is not simply to let you notice something's gone wrong. We want to help you get your systems back online, back up and running, so you can focus on the mission of your business.

Q: Excellent, thank you for sharing that information about CimTrak. Is this relevant only on-premise, or is this something that's relevant in the cloud as well?

A: Everything that I've described is relevant, not just on-premise, but in the cloud, in hybrid environments, even in OT, you know, operational technology environments. In fact, in many respects, having insight into what's happened is even more critical when your systems are hosted in the cloud by third parties.

How do you know exactly what is happening in those cloud-hosted infrastructures? How do you know that that container that you stood up two hours ago, and then destroyed, wasn't compromised in that brief time that it was running? How do you know if that if your cloud configuration settings have been altered? How do you know if your Kubernetes definition files have been changed? Or if your docker files have been altered? I mean, these are important questions that most security folks don't have great answers to and they shouldn't ignore. And that's why system integrity assurance is critical in modern, cross-platform, complex, multi-modal infrastructures. So, we believe that the CimTrak Integrity Suite is the easiest way for organizations to get a real handle on these issues.

Q: Fantastic. Well, Robert, as always, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your perspective and your expertise with us and I'm looking forward to speaking with you next time.

A: Can't wait to join you again, Hillary. Thanks for the hard questions and can't wait to see what you come up with next time.

Q: I'll have some good ones for you.