Tripwire Awarded Two New IT Security Patents

PRESS RELEASE

Tripwire Inc., the leading global provider of IT security and compliance automation solutions, today announced it has been granted U.S. Patent numbers 7,822,724 B2 and 7,765,460 B2 for change audit method, apparatus and system, and subsequent out-of-band change detection, respectively. Assigned to Tripwire inventors Robert DiFalco, Kenneth Keeler and Robert Warmack, the patent delivers an unprecedented method for conditionally examining change and automating subsequent remediation dependent on various conditions. Tripwire now holds seven U.S. patents, and these are the first to detect change in a heterogeneous manner.

Data processing devices such as servers, computers, smartphones and PDAs are deployed in a wide range of configurations, and are used for many applications across a variety of data processing environments. As such, managing these environments can be performed in a number of nonexclusive ways. Changes often occur to devices in data processing settings, and therefore compliance with various regulatory guidelines may be impacted by these changes or leave companies vulnerable to data breach attacks.

The change audit method, apparatus and system presents a distributed, scalable solution – to detect change in a consistent and heterogeneous manner – identifying out-of-band changes that provisioning systems do not detect, while carrying out complex actions based on the nature of the change. Through the change audit method, apparatus and system, users are able to detect changes to registries, database schema, protected files, configuration settings and users in an active directory, and can apply conditional logic to remediate the change.

While provisioned and automated installation tools are reliable for alerting consumers of any changes to respective objects or files, these tools can easily miss critical changes within a data processing environment. They are also unable to alert users to changes outside of the provisioned content. A component of the change audit method apparatus and system, out-of-band change detection offers the specific, conditional and automated method for facilitating management of a data processing environment by:

Creating a first digital record of one or more changes detected on a device in the data processing environment

Comparing the first to second digital record of one or more in-band changes, comprising changes previously known of by a change agent

Detecting one or more out-of-band changes to a given data processing device not previously known to a change agent

“Data is ultimately at the heart of a business. As such, it is critical that the processing environments that control this data have controls in place that ensure it is properly protected,” said Rob Warmack of Tripwire. “The inventions in these patents work to improve the state-of-the-art with regards to protecting critical data and ensuring continuous compliance. Tripwire takes pride in having secured patents for creating the technology to achieve this.”

Tripwire initially filed for the patent on June 29, 2005. For more information on U.S. Patent numbers 7,822,724 B2 for change audit, apparatus and system or 7,765,460 B2 for out-of-band change detection granted to Tripwire, Inc. please visit the U.S. Patent website.