Authorized Assets

Authorized assets residing on a network that are unknown to the IT team often lack essential patches to vulnerabilities and may contain confidential or protected data. These systems are easy targets for hackers, and a common source of data breaches.

Unauthorized Assets

Unauthorized assets are another potential risk, regardless of the intent behind their deployment. You need to find them and remove them immediately.

A common issue with traditional security approaches is the lack of built-in asset discovery and management. Having to manage an asset database manually and scan your networks for new devices takes time away from your other important tasks and can slow down the detection process.

Passive Network Monitoring

Passive Network Monitoring highlights hosts on your network and their installed software packages. Information collected includes:

1. IP and hardware MAC address parings. This is used for inventory and to detect MAC spoofing
2. IP header analysis to identify operating systems and running software packages
3. TCP/IP traffic analysis for OS fingerprinting and basic network topography

Active Network Scanning

Active Network Scanning gently probes your network to coax responses from devices. These responses provide clues that help identify the device, the OS, running services, and the software installed on it. It can often identify the software vendor and version without having to send any credentials to the host.

Inventory of Authorized and Unauthorized Software

Actively manage (inventory, track and correct) all software on the network so that only authorized software is installed and can execute, and that unmanaged software is found and prevented from installation or execution. Identifying the software running on the assets extends, deepens, and enhances your understanding of the devices on your network, resulting in a more dynamic and accurate inventory.

Detect Traffic Patterns

Traffic patterns indicative of file sharing apps (Dropbox, Skype, BitTorrent) or other prohibited peer to peer clients can also be detected. Attackers prey on unsuspecting victims not using Asset Discovery in this way who won't even notice the data leaving, other than a tiny spike in egress traffic.