Federal agencies and the nation’s critical infrastructure – such as energy, transportation systems, communications, and financial services – depend on IT systems to carry out operations and process essential data. But the risks to these IT systems are increasing – including insider threats from witting or unwitting employees, escalating and emerging threats from around the globe, and the emergence of new and more destructive attacks. Therefore a proper cybersecurity plan for the federal government is crucial.
As per GAO’s recommendation – Establishing a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy and performing effective oversight with regards to mitigation of global supply chain risks and possible malicious hardware is of the utmost importance.
Tackling this challenge requires complete visibility to your hardware assets, regardless of their characteristics and the interface used for connection, as attackers take advantage of the “blind” spots – mainly through USB Human Interface Device (HID) emulating devices or physical layer network implants.
Securing your network assets at the hardware layer by using a field proven solution developed by Cyber Physical Security experts, will be the first step in bringing your cyber security posture to the next level.
Key Challenges
Total visibility is required to account for all of the agencies IT/OT/ IoT assets – Knowing what you have, protecting what you own.
Manipulated HID devices, which impersonate as legitimate devices, sharing the same logical identification, cannot be identified with existing solutions.
Physical layer implants or spoofing devices cannot be identified by existing Network Access Control (NAC)/Intrusion Detection System (IDS) solutions, as they have visibility from L2 (MAC) and above.
How Sepio Reduces the Federal Government’s Cybersecurity Risk
By discovering rogue devices through physical layer hardware fingerprinting and behavior analytics, SepioPrime, which orchestrates Sepio’s solution, provides alerts for security threats, enforces policies and delivers risk insights and best practices recommendations. By supplying organizations with full visibility of the enterprise’s IT assets, a stronger cybersecurity posture is achieved with the following highlights:
- Graphical dashboards
- Security status summary
- Policy management
- Risk insights
- Report engine
- Standalone or VM installation
- SIEM and NAC integrations
- Open APIs
Network Security
Works at the Physical Layer, polling switches to analyze what is happening at that layer and detecting all devices including rogue devices plugged into the Ethernet network.
Peripheral Protection
Guards against rogue devices connected to USB ports through multiple security layers, including real-time behavior analysis of suspicious devices. A Rogue Device being used to carry out an attack on an organization would be detected and blocked.
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