'You can only secure what you can see' - ForeScout protects virtual machines in VMware data centres

Virtualisation provides flexibility, but also opens new avenues for exploitation

ForeScout is an agentless IoT cybersecurity company, specialising in protecting corporate networks. The firm has announced a new security solution for VMware data centre environments, building on its existing partnership with VMware to track virtual machines.

IoT devices are now a recognised security risk. These basic products can often access the entire network; this is how Target was breached in 2013, and the (very) basic level of security on such devices was exploited to build the Mirai botnet last year.

ForeScout's CounterACT security identifies devices on a network and defines exactly what they're allowed to do and which areas of the network they can access: software (an agent) does not have to be installed on individual devices. The data centre product can now perform a similar function: it can discover, classify and assess endpoints across both traditional and software-defined data centres.

The data centre solution is able to track virtual machines as they are created, moved, taken offline or retired; they can also be validated using a policy-based approach. Compliance checks for VMs can be automated to measure against standardised guidelines and initiate remediation actions to mitigate risk from non-compliant or rogue VMs.

ForeScout CEO Mike DeCesare said, "While virtualisation and cloud solutions provide much needed flexibility, having comprehensive visibility in those environments is essential to preventing blind spots… You can only secure what you can see."

At the same time as it updated its data centre product, ForeScout added new features to CounterACT. The software now includes out-of-the-box device classification, to automatically profile physical and virtual devices on a network (a crowdsourcing model means that customers can share new IoT device signatures to build up CounterACT's library); scaling to over 1 million devices; and a redesigned UI.

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