Infected Laptops

Laptop users that migrate from network to network can carry with them all sorts of viruses, worms, and general malicious software. They may unknowingly help a hacker defeat your firewall by physically bypassing it entirely.

Bypassing the Firewall

Consider the following scenario: your corporate network is secured with the most advanced, up-to-date firewall software, and is maintained by the best firewall specialist you could find. A hacker determined to infiltrate your company scans your network, but finds no points of entry to mount an attack. Unfettered by this failure, he retrieves a few names of your employees from your website (or gives you a clever phone call, then finds out who transports their laptop between the secure network and a direct broadband home connection (via more social engineering tricks, AOL Instant Messenger exploits, etc). One call to a simple program later, and the hacker has obtained full Administrator rights to a mobile laptop, making it trivial to install a back door. The following Monday your employee shows up for work and plugs the laptop in. The malicious code instantly comes alive, and all the money you spent on your firewall to protect you is wasted in the blink of an eye.

Neither corporate policy nor expert firewall specialists will prevent this, only regular internal scanning for weak systems and backdoors can.

How NeXpose Helps

Using NeXpose to regularly scan laptops within your corporate network can alert your security staff to the existence of vulnerable systems. The sooner you are alerted to a potential breach, the sooner you can take the appropriate steps to neutralize the threat. And if a hacker does successfully compromise a laptop, the risk is greatly minimized because all of your other machines are secured individually. With NeXpose securing all your employees' machines, you can be assured that as systems come in and out of your network, you have taken the steps to ensure malicious code can not compromise sensitive corporate information.