CyberCop Scanner Getting Started Guide

Benefits of Active Security
CyberCop Scanner in Active Security
The Internet and the increasingly complex security needs of today’s geographically
distributed “virtual” corporations are pushing the limits of what a corporate IT
department can be reasonably expected to handle. Network administrators are being
asked to protect more and more with limited resources.
Most system failures are due to user error, not product flaw or hacker attack. Security
vulnerabilities are most often introduced accidentally by the very people the system
administrator is trying to protect: the sometimes naive internal user. Detecting and
correcting these multiplying vulnerabilities as they arise takes constant work because
existing security analysis tools make it too hard to be thorough and fast enough — they
generate huge amounts of data, force you to parse it all, and then it still takes a further
human decision and a manual action, like running a program to shut down a network
port, to address each problem. An administrator simply can’t be everywhere at once.
There are lots of tools for finding network security vulnerabilities, and you may think
that simply using the tools is enough. This is a dangerous misconception. What
matters is what you configure them to look for, and what actually happens when they
find vulnerabilities. Without a network security policy tailored to your particular
requirements, no network security tool can effectively protect you.
In other words, you need to have a network security policy that reflects your
organization’s security goals, and you need to be certain that your policy is being
reliably carried out. This means that the security system needs to actually implement
the policy, actively responding to vulnerabilities as they’re detected, working
automatically rather than waiting for a human’s attention. Only automated security
policy enforcement tools will do the job these days.
Of course, having the world’s best security policy and an elegant automatic security
system won’t protect you if a hacker could simply crack the security system itself.
Your policy enforcer has to protect itself from tampering, too.
Active Security is all of that: a secure system that you can train to automatically take
any action your policy calls for whenever it finds any network security vulnerability
that concerns you. It’s a technology that enables you to be far more diligent about
cleaning up security holes as they arise because it’s more thorough than a person and
faster than a person — once you’ve set it up for your network security policies, your
administrator just runs a scan and Active Security does the rest. You can configure the
system to automatically take care of some of the problems it may find — and if Active
Security detects a problem it can’t handle on its own, it can alert the administrator via
pager or email.
Active Security is your network administrator’s most valuable weapon in the constant
uphill battle of maintaining your network security.
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