Some unknown security tools
Firewalls, antivirus, and IAM are some examples of the most used Security tools by companies, but there are some other solutions that you may have never heard about.
Even the information security market has a lot of players. Most of these solutions makers have their best-seller products, for example CheckPoint and firewalls, HP ArcSight and SIEM, NetIQ, IBM & CA and IAM. These companies sell these products because their demand is high, obviously. However, many other companies have some specific solutions that, apparently, everybody needs, but they don’t even know that exist.
Some readers will not have an “aha moment” in this article. But you are welcome to contribute here on “comments” with your suggestion of security tools that are not well known.
Database Protection
When your developer asks to a DBA to create a user on the database management system, information security should be involved. The role of IS is to verify if the rights requested by the developer are correctly set, based on the information that the database is storing. But, how do you enforce the developer to correctly use the given access? How to make sure that the developer isn’t giving the credentials to anyone? The database protections acts like a firewall, it analyzes the content and source of queries and decides if it will allow or deny the query to go ahead to the DBMS.
Authentication based on Risk
Some companies have a lot of users accessing important systems using public hotspots, mobile Internet network or even at home, using the same computer as his/her child uses to play games on the Internet. Those places represent risks to the company data since the communication may be tapped or the user may be victim of some malware that collects keyboard data. In situations like these an authentication based on risk could help the company to avoid risks. If users have been identified using a public hotspot, the authentication automatically switch from a simple username and password to a strong one based on a ‘One Time Password’ solution or SMS token.
API Management
If a company wants to share inside information with partners, it could use API’s, as it establishes some rules and common procedures to obtain the selected data. This is largely used by Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn when they want to share user authentication and data, and this is coming to Enterprise in a quick pace. E.g. let’s say that a real state agency wants to distribute to its partners its lists of offerings within the city and neighborhoods. Information security is essential to control that the given access to the partner is being used only by that specific partner. Also, when API allows data receiving, the payload content must be evaluated to make sure it is safe. To help costumers on these duties, API management solutions were designed.
Mobile code inspect
Some companies are deploying mobile apps with some errors, and making corrections to the software later as they find security flaws. If you want to keep your company safe, you may use Mobile Code Inspector tool, it evaluates codes for bugs or improvements based on best practices. Of course, it will not solve all of your problems, but at least it will help you eliminating the obvious ones.
SOA Gateway to protect your WebService
When publishing services through a WebService interface you may face some problems with SOAP requests, as errors or bad intentioned codes. One of the solutions to protect your WebService is to implement a Gateway that inspects and analyzes the content and the sources of requests. Based on rules and integrations with other products, the admin may allow, deny or even change the request’s content.
Anti-fraud inspector inside your application
As soon as your company decides to deploy a public application, attackers will study it for some security vulnerability and they will exploit it. This solution is composed by some libraries and agents that are embedded to your web or mobile applications, it analyzes your system through internal eyes, inspecting requests and system calls. This protection helps you to detect malwares, identity frauds, protect web sessions and detect phishing.
Password Vault or Privileged Identity Management
With many operating systems, databases, and application servers, companies face some hard work to manage user credentials for admins. That’s because they may have more than one admin using an unnamed credential. To help you protecting privileged systems, information security software makers developed Password Vaults and Privileged Identity Management systems, these softwares monitor and audit who was using the master key during a time frame and even replay the admin session for audit reasons.
Fraud Analysis for any market
Many frauds could be detected before being deployed by attackers, that’s because frauds normally have patterns or sets of actions that can imply that an attacker is studying your infrastructure. This solution monitors your business transactions, seeking for patterns of frauds or any other suspicious attitude. It also helps you with historical transactions to analyze committed crimes. Moreover, it may be fed with external information provided by security intelligence agencies.
Anti-DDoS Filter
Your institutional website is not the only victim of DDoS attacks, your IT infrastructure as your mail servers are under constant rush. If you choose not to filter it, this dirty traffic will consume your bandwidth. Some telecom companies and Internet providers offer clean traffic between the Internet and your company website which keeps unwelcome requests away.
As I mentioned earlier, there was no surprising news for some of you. But a few of these alternatives were a big surprise to me, as I noticed that some solutions already existed as products. There is another long list of needs of IT not covered by any software maker; but some day these needs will be addressed.
Image Credit: Josep Ma. Rosell by CC on Flickr
