Exploring Advanced Tripwire Enterprise Capabilities

In today’s digital landscape, it is important for organizations to depend upon the tools they use for cybersecurity. Large businesses can employ many security solutions, practices, and policies that must combine to create a robust and layered security strategy. While many of these tools are important and necessary, organizations often don’t use them to their full potential.

With any security tool or platform, it is important to understand its features beyond the most basic functions. Solutions can have advanced capabilities that are less commonly used but that can greatly benefit an organization. Below are some highlights from a recent webinar about the advanced functions of Fortra’s Tripwire Enterprise (TE).

What is Tripwire Enterprise?

Fortra’s TE is a cybersecurity solution that monitors integrity to bolster security and ensure continuous compliance. The most basic use cases for the solution that most customers are already aware of are monitoring file integrity and managing security configurations. These vital capabilities help many organizations with some of the more tedious and time-consuming aspects of building and maintaining an effective cybersecurity strategy.

Organizations can benefit from using TE in multiple ways:

• Unparalleled Visibility: TE allows visibility into any network devices, systems, and databases in order to gather insightful and actionable information that organizations can use to improve their security posture, prioritize threats, and remediate vulnerabilities.
• Security Beyond Compliance: Compliance requirements are crucial for any organization to consider when building a cybersecurity strategy, but robust and effective security goes beyond the minimum requirements for compliance. TE goes further than basic file integrity monitoring (FIM) and security configuration management (SCM) tools, contributing to the organization’s security and compliance.
• Proven Leader: Fortra’s TE is a trusted platform with years of leadership behind it, so organizations can be confident that the tool is reliable, effective, and backed by expert knowledge.

Interesting Tripwire Enterprise Use Cases

The most popular use cases for TE include FIM for compliance, FIM for security, policy monitoring for compliance, policy monitoring for security, advanced monitoring, and advanced control. These are the basic functions that most users are aware of and rely on TE for. However, TE contains so much more than what is on the surface. Some of TE’s more advanced and less popular use cases can provide organizations with much-needed security aid.

In addition to the basic features, Fortra’s TE has the ability to:

• Address Zero-Day Vulnerabilities: When an alert is put out stating that a common utility has a zero-day vulnerability, organizations can use TE’s detailed changes report and information about the vulnerability to locate changes that may indicate a compromised program. Armed with information from the security alert, such as the name, path, and MD5 hash of the vulnerable file, running a scoped detailed changes report can locate instances of the potentially compromised file within an organization’s systems.
• Operating System Patch Change Reconciliation: Using TE’s Dynamic Software Reconciliation (DSR) function, organizations can ensure that changes are reconciled and promoted following a patch cycle. DSR takes changes found on the disk and compares them with TE change databases to automatically reconcile changes. This can help organizations to ensure that all of their software is compatible and integrated securely after patches occur that may lead to dissonance and cause security vulnerabilities.
• Restore Files from Backup: TE’s Action Manager for Workflow Management utilizes rules to trigger an action automatically when a change is detected. TE Commander, the command line interface to TE API, enables organizations to carry out predefined or custom actions in response to detected changes. These actions include sending a change notification, promoting the change to the monitored file, restoring the file from a backup, baselining the newly restored file, and carrying on with business as usual.
• Offline a System: Actions in TE are very powerful and can be leveraged to respond to critical threats. The execution action runs a Windows command to isolate an important system when the software detects a change in a monitored critical component. This feature can use real-time monitoring to provide immediate mitigation for any changes that have the potential to cause critical problems for the organization.

Conclusion

To use platforms like Fortra’s Tripwire Enterprise to their fullest potential and get the most out of the product, it is important to learn about not just the basic features but some of the more advanced use cases. This “Digging Deeper” webinar delves into several lesser-known advanced capabilities of TE to inform of all the advantages that can be garnered from the solution. By learning about these capabilities and optimizing security protocols accordingly, organizations can ensure that they are using all of the tool at their disposal to maintain compliance, prevent attacks, and protect their assets.