Show posts tagged:
compliance

Improved software compliance with packages-allowlist

Having a list of software that is allowed to be installed on a host is a strategy to prevent and fix security gaps and maintain compliance with operational guidelines. This zero-trust methodology ensures that only explicitly permitted applications are allowed to be present on a host unlike package block-listing which enumerates an explicit list of software that is not allowed to be present. In fact, with a software allow-list, you are essentially block-listing everything except the software you allow.

Posted by Nick Anderson
April 6, 2023

Show Notes: The Agent is In - Episode 23 - Detecting Previously Hidden Malware With Invary & CFEngine

Can you trust the integrity of your base operating system runtime? Jason Rogers and Dr. Wesley Peck of Invary join Cody, Craig and Nick to chat about their Runtime Integrity technology. They discuss the challenges of Trust, Information Technology Knowledge Management, and how Invary fits in the SecOps, Systems Automation, Security and Compliance landscape. Nick shares an example of an early integration between CFEngine and the Invary RISe agent1 with reporting in Mission Portal and talks about the different ways to approach integration.

Posted by Nick Anderson
March 30, 2023

Show Notes: The Agent is In - Episode 20 - Reviewing the 2022 CFEngine Holiday Security Calendar

For the holiday season gift yourself an improved infrastructure security posture. Join Craig, Cody, and Nick as they wrap up 2022 and the 20th episode of The Agent is In reviewing CFEngines’ 2022 Holiday Security Calendar which has advice picked straight from industry standard security hardening guides like the OpenSCAP Security Policies and Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs). Craig demos new modules like maintainers-in-motd, file-permissions, enable-aslr, highlights guidance on writing your own security policies and more.

Posted by Nick Anderson
December 29, 2022

Security holiday calendar - Part 2

Thank you for following along with our security themed holiday calendar. Today, we summarize the last half of the calendar, in case you missed some days. Part 1 recap (12/25) A couple of weeks ago, on the 12th of December, we posted a recap of the first 12 days: cfengine.com/blog/2022/security-holiday-calendar-part-1 File integrity monitoring with CFEngine (13/25) On the 13th, we took a look at how you can use File Integrity monitoring in CFEngine for similar functionality to AIDE:

December 25, 2022

5 security hardening CFEngine policy examples

Throughout the security holiday calendar, we’ve looked at modules for enforcing security requirements. Writing the policy to achieve these security hardening goals is easy. By learning how, you can write policy (or modules) for any requirements, including those specific to your organization. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at five beginner-level examples to get you started, focusing on the most common resources to manage with CFEngine; files and packages.

December 19, 2022

File integrity monitoring with CFEngine

File integrity monitoring is an important aspect in managing your infrastructure. Tripwire and AIDE are often cited as necessary tools by compliance frameworks1,2,3. Of course CFEngine can manage a file to make sure it contains desired content, but did you know that CFEngine also has the capability to simply monitor a file for change? In this blog post we take a look at CFEngines’ changes attribute for files promises. File promises, changes body To monitor a file for change in CFEngine you must have a files promise with a changes body attached.

Posted by Nick Anderson
December 13, 2022

Security holiday calendar - Part 1

As it was well received last year, we decided to do another security-focused holiday calendar this year. The concept was roughly the same, but instead of only adding security hardening modules, we’ve also added in some other security advice and blog posts to improve the variety. Now that we’re halfway through to 24 (or 25), let’s recap the first half of the calendar. The problematic remote shell (rsh) (1/25) Remote shell (rsh) allows you to log in and send commands to another computer over the network.

December 12, 2022

Building a Compliance Report based on inventory modules

In CFEngine Enterprise we collect information from each system in the infrastructure as inventory. Some inventory is available by default, and more can be added using modules or writing policy. You can use inventory information to create a Compliance Report with checks that determine if the information complies with your security requirements. In this blog post, we will use some modules from CFEngine Build which provide inventory data, and build a Compliance Report on top of those.

Posted by Craig Comstock
December 9, 2022

Updates, upgrades, and uptime

All software of any significant size has bugs, vulnerabilities, and other weaknesses. This includes the operating system (OS), libraries, command line tools, services and graphical applications. Across your infrastructure, you should have an overview of what operating systems and software you have installed. Additionally, automated ways of upgrading the OS, as well as packages are desirable. Finally, ways of highlighting problematic hosts (with old operating systems and software) and prioritizing them helps your efforts to upgrade and secure your machines.

December 2, 2022

Scary stories you won't believe until they happen to you!

For halloween this year, we wanted to share some scary scenarios along with security recommendations to help avoid them. All the names, companies and characters are made up, but the events and experiences are based on things which could happen, or have happened in the real world. 1. Horrors of the logging library Mary the sysadmin looks over at her monitoring system, noticing an increase in requests with special characters. She recognizes the strings as log4shell vulnerability exploit attempts.

October 27, 2022
Get in touch with us
to discuss how we can help!
Contact us
Sign up for
our newsletter
By signing up, you agree to your email address being stored and used to receive newsletters about CFEngine. We use tracking in our newsletter emails to improve our marketing content.