File integrity monitoring (FIM) started back in 1997 when Gene Kim launched Tripwire and its “Change Audit” solution. Just a few years later, Change Audit became FIM; this rebranded tool worked with the 12 security controls identified in Visa’s Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP). CISP became PCI DSS 1.0, and things continued to evolve after that. Which brings us to the present day.

Malware attacks are escalating. For example, there were 57 million IoT malware attacks in the first half of 2022, a staggering 77% increase year to date. Unfortunately, traditional signature-based antivirus and sand-boxing technologies are insufficient against today’s sophisticated attacks. In particular, advanced persistent threat (APT) viruses, Trojan malware and zero-day malware often evade these defenses.

File integrity monitoring is essential for information security because it helps quickly identify unauthorized changes to critical files that could lead to data loss and business disruptions. File changes may be your first or only indication that you’ve been hacked in a cyberattack or compromised through errors by staff or system update processes.

File integrity monitoring (FIM) is essential for securing data and meeting compliance regulations. In particular, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires organizations to use FIM to help secure their business systems against card data theft by detecting changes to critical system files. This article explains these PCI DSS requirements and how to achieve compliance using FIM.

The benefits of a capable and properly deployed File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) solution are plentiful: And the importance of FIM cannot be understated. Let’s not forgot what the Center for Internet Security (CIS) says in its Distribution Independent Linux Benchmark version 2.0.0.

Change is prolific in organizations’ IT environments. Hardware assets change. Software programs change. Configuration states change. Some of these modifications are authorized insofar as they occur during an organization’s regular patching cycle, while others cause concern by popping up unexpectedly. Organizations commonly respond to this dynamism by investing in asset discovery and secure configuration management (SCM).

Within the FIM technology market, there are choices to be made. Agent-based or agentless is the most common choice, but even then there are both SIEM and ‘pure-play’ FIM, solutions to choose between.

In order to maintain the integrity of a Windows file system, File Integrity Monitoring is applied to ensure no unauthorized changes are made to files, folders or configuration settings.

If File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) were easy, everyone would be doing it. Actually, it is pretty easy. It’s not exactly rocket science. Practically anyone with a modicum of Python, Perl or development skills can write an app or a script to gather the checksum of a file, compare it to a list or baseline, and tell you whether or not said file has changed.

Securing AWS Fargate serverless workloads can be tricky as AWS does not provide much detail about the internal workings. After all… it’s not your business, AWS manages the scaling of underlying resources for you. :) While the security and stability of Fargate’s system is an inherent feature, Fargate follows a shared responsibility model, where you still have to take care of securing those parts specific to your application..