Symantec Critical System Protection

We are using Symantec Critical System Protection as an advanced endpoint protection product on some critical systems. We would like to expand the product to any system on which we would like to implement "whitelist" products. Critical System Protection is a product that whitelists certain behaviors and does not allow any other behaviors on a protected system after a profile is locked. This helps with systems that are static that an organization would like to make sure does not change in any way. This product is not recommended for fluid systems such as user workstations because the administrative burden of keeping the profiles would be very difficult for small teams to accommodate.

When I came into this role the company already had Symantec Critical System Protection, now called Data Center Security, already deployed and monitoring various PCI related systems. There was no one who was dedicated to manage this system until I was promoted into this position. Over the past 5 years we have expanded the use of this product to not only help us detect questionable activity within the various monitored systems but on some systems connected to our PCI environment, we have implemented intrusion prevention in terms of network traffic. This product helps us meet and exceed PCI requirements each and every year. It helps us achieve PCI compliance by monitoring what is required of us as well as block unauthorized/malicious activity. An example of this is last year our QSA's were able to successfully map a drive via the standard Microsoft ports and gain access into our retail environment. To close this finding, I created an IP policy to block this traffic at the host. After the policy was deployed to the agent, they were no longer able to gain access through the various tools they had access to. I have also set up various alerts, including when someone tampers with the IPS driver disabling it.

A few years ago something happened with our SQL database for the product where it caused the system to become offline. They generally do not support SQL databases, it is generally outside their scope of support. Long story short, we had to rebuild the server and restore the database. During that time their backline support was on the phone with us via WebEx sessions and they assisted in restoring the required configuration files and certs needed. They also constantly followed up to ensure that all of the agents were reporting back properly after the database was up and running.