Think You're Compliant?

Endforce will begin offering a Web-based security compliance service later this month that lets you assess security of your workstations and laptops, Dark Reading has learned.

The new service, called quickSCAN, goes live July 24 and will be offered free to most enterprises, according to Endforce executives. The idea is to give enterprises the chance to determine which clients and servers have what security tools installed and whether they are running the most up-to-date patches, for instance, before rolling out a network access control (NAC) infrastructure that enforces security policy.

"This is a nice way of getting a quick assessment without installing software," says Ken Tyminski, an independent security consultant and former CISO for Prudential. "Most companies are surprised to find out they are not as well protected or properly configured as they think they are. This will help them understand what to do to clean up their environment."

Endforce came up with the new service after several of its own major NAC enterprise customers were finding up to 70 percent of their managed end-point systems didn't comply with their internal security policies. "They were finding, in addition to the problem of guest and unmanaged accounts, a huge percentage of their managed assets weren't compliant," says Bill Emerick, CTO of Endforce.

The idea is that a company would use the QuickScan service (which is listed at $2,000, though Endforce usually waives the fee altogether) before purchasing or installing an NAC solution. "Now they can understand the problem -- five different personal firewalls and three versions of spyware, for example, out there -- before they roll out the NAC," says Jeff Sturgeon, senior vice president of Endforce.

QuickScan will mostly be used for checking antivirus, firewall, and antispyware updates, Emerick says, but it also could be used to help with checking on the status of Microsoft's latest security patches, for instance. (See The Patch Race Is On.) Even if you use tools that push Microsoft patches, many machines remain noncompliant, he says. "When patches get pushed, computers can be turned off, out of the office, or reimaged."

From its Website, Endforce provides a template HTML email message a CISO can send out to users with an embedded link to the service. All the user has to do is click on it and the tool does its work. "We pull and consolidate the information and provide detailed reports," Sturgeon says.

Among the information it provides is the number of users with secure OS patches and without, plus an inventory of personal firewalls, anti-spyware and antivirus apps, and any file-sharing apps. It details what's installed and running on the endpoints.

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading