Network-wide control of portable storage, media and consumer electronic devicesortable

The need to control entry and exit of data via USB sticks, iPods, PDAs and other devices
You have invested in network anti-virus software, firewalls, email and web content security to protect against external threats. Yet any user can come into the office, plug in a USB stick the size of the average keychain and take in/out over 2 GB of data. This poses a tremendous threat: Users can take confidential data or they can unknowingly introduce viruses, trojans, illegal software and more – actions that can affect your network and company severely. Yet, as an administrator you have no way to control this! Group policy offers no control.

According to a 2005 FBI Computer Crime Survey, 44% of organizations have reported network intrusions from within their own organizations. Technology analyst Gartner warns that portable devices containing a USB or FireWire connection are a serious new threat to businesses. In their report, Gartner named removable media devices as a significant security risk in the workplace and advised that these can be used both to download confidential data, and also to introduce a virus into the company network.

Regain control with GFI EndPointSecurity

GFI EndPointSecurity allows administrators to actively manage user access to:

• Media players, including iPod, Creative Zen and others
• USB sticks, CompactFlash, memory cards, CDs, floppies & other storage devices
• PDAs, BlackBerry handhelds, mobile phone and similar communication devices
• Network cards, laptops and other network connections.

How it works

To control access, GFI EndPointSecurity installs a small footprint agent on the machine. This agent is only 1.2 MB in size – the user will never know it is there. GFI EndPointSecurity includes a remote deployment tool based on GFI LANguard technology, allowing you to deploy the agent to hundreds of machines with just a few clicks. After installation, the agent queries Active Directory when the user logs on and sets permissions to the different nodes accordingly. If the user is not a member of a group that allows him/her access, then access to the device is blocked.

USB sticks are one of the main threats as they are small, easily hidden and can store up to 4 GB of data. GFI EndPointSecurity recognizes USB storage sticks in addition to any device that can be mounted as a hard disk (whether accessed via USB, FireWire, etc.). For example, plugging a digital camera into a USB port gives users access to storage on an SD card; SD cards are available in several sizes including 2 GB and over.

You can centrally disable users from reading or writing data to/from a CD or floppy. This way, you can block normal users from bringing in data that could be harmful to your network, such as viruses, trojans and other malware. Although you can switch off CD and/or floppy access from the BIOS, in reality this solution is impractical: You would have to physically visit the machine to temporarily switch off protection and install software. In addition, advanced users can hack the BIOS.

GFI EndPointSecurity protects your network against non-removable media devices by allowing you to lock down a machine to a specific hardware level, guaranteeing protection against Bluetooth devices, network cards and more.

You can configure and categorize computers into different protection groups: For each group you may specify different levels of protection and devices to allow or disallow access to. You can also leverage the power of groups and make an entire department a member of the group and easily change the settings for the entire group. Configuration of GFI EndPointSecurity is effortless and leverages the power of Active Directory and does not require the administrator to remember and keep track of which policies were deployed to which computers. Other storage control software requires cumbersome per-machine administration, forcing you to make the changes on a per-machine basis and update the configuration on each machine before the settings can take effect.

Configure whether a user should be granted read/write access or both access capabilities for the following types of devices: Removable media, CD, DVD, floppies and other devices running a file system.

With GFI EndPointSecurity you can log device-related user activity to both the event log and a central SQL Server. A list of files accessed to/from the device is recorded whenever users plug in devices both successfully and unsuccessfully.

The GFI EndPointSecurity remote deployment tool can deploy the agent network-wide in a few minutes. You can configure to deploy domain-wide, per computer or to a list of computers.

Because you can easily add/remove a user to a group in Active Directory, it is simple to grant temporary access to a removable media, floppy or CD. Temporary access may be occasionally required, but should not mean that you cannot control access the rest of the time.

• Support for operating systems in any Unicode-compliant language

For a more detailed description of our Software Services, please contact our sales Department at sales@ppn.com.hk or Click Here.