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The Appeal of Open Source Security (OSSEC) to Small and Midsize Businesses - Atomicorp - Unified Security Built on OSSEC

The Appeal of Open Source Security (OSSEC) to Small and Midsize Businesses

Posted on by Mike Shinn

An open source DevSecOps approach enables small to midsize enterprises to keep pace with security threats as digital business expands. Atomic OSSEC intrusion detection and Atomic Protector cloud workload protection solutions reflect this open source DevSecOps approach, helping small IT teams to rapidly secure the services and apps they must deliver.

Cyber-attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated, utilizing patience, able to outmaneuver even the most well-defended or large-budget security schemas. Even the biggest companies with extensive security resources are getting hacked. Most small to midsize businesses aren’t fully prepared or defended in depth, so SMBs are not immune or off the hacker radar. 28 percent of breaches in Verizon’s 2020 DBIR (Data Breach Investigations Report) were categorized as small businesses.

The network is no longer private; traffic and data is going over the public internet and critical resources are often hosted in or completely provided in the cloud, and this complicates security and privacy issues by obscuring an organization’s visibility and control. It takes time and great attention to apply security across the myriad business channels and distributed computing components sprouting up today. 

Web sites can easily be duplicated to carry out phishing attacks, credential caches easily pilfered, cloud host pages spoofed, and man-in-the-middle breaches executed, where the assailant can silently wait to launch a zero-day or otherwise calculated attack. Or maybe you are unknowingly at risk of getting hit by a denial-of-service attack knocking out your network with no way to shut it off.

Small IT security teams – in which roles straddle security and broader IT responsibilities – need help. Patching and applying security measures retroactively is not keeping pace. The bad guys are simply faster and have more resources than even large enterprises. This is the powerful lure of DevSecOps methodologies for small to midsize organizations. With DevSecOps, security control and application keep pace with business and operations and the always improving adversaries’ capabilities. OSSEC represents a smart leap ahead.

OSSEC, OSSEC+ and Atomic OSSEC

Open Source Security (OSSEC) represents a step toward enhanced security and DevSecOps across hybrid cloud environments because of its open-source foundation and community service development platform. With OSSEC’s free registration, you get a security dashboard and a solid toolset of security and privacy capabilities, such as: 

  • Intrusion detection
  • Log management
  • File integrity monitoring
  • Active response

It’s free, and flexible enough for most cloud, container, and server environments.

OSSEC+, the next evolution of OSSEC, further helps to keep up with digital business development and rapid new service launches. Your security needs technology that moves as quickly as your business does. OSSEC+ brings:

  • Real-time community threat sharing, so your threat detection is fueled by bigger data and analytics.
  • Machine learning (ML) that sharpens detection and protection capabilities from a balanced secure access perspective.
  • 1,000s of new rules for securing your environments.
  • Use of a security dashboard.
  • Built-in support for regulatory compliance. 

OSSEC+ is also free to the user organization.

Open source makes advanced security tools more affordable through OSSEC and OSSEC+, but there’s a catch. Small teams often need the security rules, tools, and technical expertise to apply these rules and tools and the stronger protection that comes with them.

Going Atomic

With Atomic OSSEC, you get more. 

Atomic OSSEC is built specifically for organizations that need to scale their security capabilities to meet today’s advanced threats. With a dedicated management console, thousands of pre-built OSSEC rules, vulnerability management, compliance reporting, and more, the Atomic OSSEC intrusion detection system makes it easy to deploy, manage, and leverage OSSEC in any on-premise, cloud, or hybrid environment.

In addition to the expertise of commercial (professional service) support, the transition from community OSSEC to Atomic OSSEC brings the following additions to OSSEC+: 

  • A Management Console (OSSEC GUI)
  • 5,000 new OSSEC Rules
  • Advanced OSSEC Agent Management
  • Advanced File Integrity Monitoring
  • Vulnerability Scanning
  • Native Cloud Provider Integration (AWS, Azure, GCP)
  • Malware Protection
  • Global Threat Intelligence
  • Compliance Auditing and Reporting
  • Role Based Access Control
  • Report Generation System and Search Engine
  • Native SIEM Integration (ELK, Splunk, Arcsight, others)
  • Slack, PagerDuty, Jira Integrations
  • Cloudflare Integration
  • System and Application Inventory Management
  • Advanced Encryption (PKI and Noise Socket) 

Atomicorp provides a powerful platform and DevOps friendly tools that empower you to get the most out of your OSSEC deployment. It’s available as software as a service (SaaS) for faster deployment and easier use.

Atomic ModSecurity, SIEMs, WAFs, and Atomic Protector…

A web application firewall (WAF) should provide the functionality and technical expertise needed to fend off today’s sophisticated or sustained assaults, without false positives that might disrupt your business.

Atomic ModSecurity Rules and WAF bring compelling web application firewall advantages:

  • The most complete and mature ModSecurity rules available
  • Enterprise-level professional support, 365x24x7
  • Daily update frequency
  • Same day response time for false positives
  • Virtual patches
  • Protection against brute force attacks
  • Strong defense-in-depth protection against lateral movement
  • Page rank protection
  • SSRF, CSRF and XXE protection
  • Real-time malware protection 
  • Global threat intelligence
  • Layer 7 DOS protection
  • Cloudflare integration
  • Data loss prevention
  • Management and compliance reports
  • And more, managed from a SIEM-like active response security console.

Solutions such as Atomic OSSEC and Atomic ModSecurity Rules and WAF are not just the rules but the tools and integrations, providing a SIEM-like management console, its own web application firewall (WAF), and integration with major cloud platform providers. This is important today because out on the Web and in the cloud is where the action is (and the attacks are). Targeted attacks on cloud assets are on the rise.

And then there’s Atomic Protector (formerly Atomic Secured Linux (ASL), a cloud workload protection platform (CWPP) and endpoint security solution built for organizations with limited expertise and resources. Small companies don’t have large IT departments. Often, an IT manager takes on a lot of the security duties, and there’s often no CISO. There’s an approach of security ‘by committee.’ With technologists having to share the duties as the computing surface expands into the cloud, Atomic Protector makes the job easier and more secure for the security team and the organization as a whole with an easy-to-deploy solution that secures your cloud, on-premise and hybrid servers, as well as laptops and desktops, easily and completely. 

Atomic Protector is the most widely distributed full-stack security solution for Linux servers today. Our customers withstand billions of daily attacks. This volume has become the norm because attackers have proliferated and many now employ automation. The only way to combat this escalation is to automate defense.

Atomic Protector provides:

  • Automation to secure your system against modern threats without requiring in-depth internal expertise. It will take care of search and destroy (SND), and maintain itself and the system it’s installed on.
  • Memory protection
  • File integrity monitoring
  • Self healing
  • Vulnerability shielding
  • Global threat intelligence
  • Brute force protection
  • Lateral access attack protection
  • Role based access control
  • Hardening engine
  • Compliance scanner
  • Vulnerability scanner
  • Integration with Cloudflare
  • Integration with Splunk, QRadar, and other SIEMs
  • Includes a built-in WAF, as described above
  • Is everything you need to protect a server in one simple easy-to-install-and-use product

All aforementioned Atomic products bring:

  • Reduction of manual and menial tasks.
  • The ability to orchestrate and manage security and analyze the results.
  • Security working for you versus you for it.
  • A management and reporting dashboard that lets you measure security efficacy and comply.
  • A nice price for the SMB.

 

Get the most out of Open Source Security (OSSEC) with Atomic OSSEC.

Protect your digital enterprise with Atomic ModSecurity and Atomic ModSecurity WAF.

Turn it on and protect your server and database environments with Atomic Protector.