Security, compliance, and IT operations leaders need a powerful and effective way to accurately identify security misconfigurations and indicators of compromise. Tripwire® Enterprise is the leading file integrity monitoring (FIM) and security configuration management (SCM) compliance monitoring solution—and delivers security capability far beyond compliance.
If you’re already familiar with Tripwire Enterprise, you may know it as the most powerful FIM compliance solution of its kind. But there are several other key use cases you can take advantage of to maximize the efficacy of your organization’s security and compliance programs.
Use this guide to explore the many ways Tripwire Enterprise can protect your organization with superior security and continuous compliance.
FIM for Compliance
Differentiate between normal versus suspicious file changes for inscope assets when monitoring with Tripwire Enterprise. Visibility into which file changes affect your compliance equips you with the ability to act fast and return your systems to a compliant state.
As the inventors of file integrity monitory (FIM), Tripwire has had 20+ years to develop an unmatched depth and breadth of detection to help organizations:
- Identify “good” versus “bad” changes
- Speed up the audit process with a solution well-known among compliance auditors
- Cover numerous platforms, policies, standards, regulations, and vendor guidelines with a content library of more than 4,000 combinations
FIM for Security
Since FIM is such an integral security control for compliance, there is a common misconception that it’s for compliance only. In reality, the FIM powering Tripwire Enterprise supports advanced security use cases—and advanced security—as well. Customize what you monitor to include environment-specific software and devices outside the standard platform set (e.g., threats inside the data center, not just protecting the perimeter). And this data can be integrated with other solutions such as Splunk and ServiceNow for aggregation and a complete picture of your security status.
Tripwire Enterprise helps:
- Gain extensive additional visibility across your ecosystem, including change over time
- Reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) with advanced forensic analysis
- Protect against the reputational and financial risk posed by breaches or outages
Policy Monitoring for Compliance
Tripwire Enterprise combines two essential security controls: FIM and security configuration management (SCM). This combination eases the burden on organizations to prove their systems are compliant with regulatory compliance frameworks via audit-ready reporting. With unmatched breadth and depth in terms of compliance framework coverage, you can align your systems with multiple standards simultaneously without time consuming manual effort. The SCM workflow leverages predefined policy content and simplifies waivers and remediation processes.
Tripwire Enterprise:
- Keeps policy content automatically up to date
- Gives clear remediation advice or automates remediation workflows
- Monitors open ports and services as well as installed software
- Enables comprehensive multi-regulatory compliance
Policy Monitoring for Security
In addition to regulatory compliance, policy monitoring is crucial for security in organizations, especially those with internal audit, compliance, or GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) teams—after all, the reason regulatory compliance mandates exist is to set a required standard or baseline for best-practice security in order to protect sensitive data. Along with standards like PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), Tripwire Enterprise also offers policy content for unenforced security frameworks such as the Center for Internet Security’s CIS Controls and the MITRE ATT&CK framework to tighten security.
With Tripwire Enterprise you can:
- Create your own customized internal policy content supporting additional high priority security frameworks
- Use configuration management database (CMDB) and IT service management (ITSM) ticketing integrations
- Increase your security efficacy, and reduce risk of a breach or service outage
Advanced Monitoring
Use Tripwire Enterprise as a powerful search tool within the IT environment to find where files do (or do not) exist on each machine. The flexibility of its monitoring capabilities allows you to collect important data quickly, which is especially valuable in the presence of a major new security vulnerability (e.g., Log4j), malware, or indicators of compromise, enabling a rapid search of all monitored assets down to the specific file level. Also, this capability can easily validate configurations across sets of machines to make sure they've been updated correctly when closing out a change ticket during a deployment window.
Tripwire Enterprise allows you to:
- Specify any file name and find all instances of that file on assets with the agent installed
- Deploy a script in any programming language with COCR (Command Output Capture Rules) to greatly expand the monitoring options for less accessible devices
- Assess exposure to potential vulnerabilities—even before a fix has been released (e.g., Log4j)
Advanced Control
The Tripwire Axon® agent used with Tripwire Enterprise is a powerful endpoint data collection agent, that allows you to execute arbitrary commands or scripts on the assets monitored by Tripwire Enterprise—meaning it’s possible to operationalize ad-hoc sysadmin functionality. For example, if a server needs to be restarted, a configuration updated, or even restart of the service of another tool that is failing to respond, Tripwire Enterprise can assist. This broadly applicable, highly extensible capability saves admin teams a significant amount of time when trying to perform an ad hoc set of commands on several remote machines.
Tripwire Enterprise can help:
- Update configurations on thousands of servers and reboot them as needed
- Create an ad hoc script to be deployed, run, and reported upon
- Manage complex and varied IT infrastructure with flexibility
Talk to an Expert
Contact one of our security and compliance experts. We look forward to learning about your specific needs and answering any questions you have about taking advantage of these Tripwire Enterprise use cases to overcome your biggest security and compliance challenges.