In this Gears Release, we have new notifications to help administrators stay informed about what is happening to devices in their network. Gears admins can now receive email notifications on device events and issues, and be alerted if a device has left your network vulnerable with a duplicate MAC address. Read up on our new notification features, and see what's coming next to OPSWAT Gears by following our roadmap!
Code Name: "Illinois"
- Email Notifications for Device Issues and Events
- Agent Removal Details for Admins
- Duplicate MAC Address Protection
- A Smaller, Faster Windows Agent
- Improved Reports for Inventory and Infections
- Other Enhancements and Fixes
Email Notifications for Device Issues and Events
Admins can now be notified via email for admin and device events. We've added this feature in order to give IT administrators the tools necessary to stay informed based on their own preferences. Admins can choose whether they'd like to be emailed when a device compliance state changes, an infection is found, configuration is changed and more. The notifications can even be tailored for managed and guest devices. This allows admins to stay informed of device events and issues throughout their security compliance and admittance.
New Email Notifications for Admins - Click to Enlarge
The first release of this feature will only email the account admin. We will soon be enhancing this to allow specific email addresses to be configured to receive the notifications.
Agent Removal Details for Admins
In the Gears event logs, admins can now distinguish devices removed by a Gears admin and those removed by the device user. Combined with the new email notifications, this is a great way to track inventory and Gears coverage to maximize your protection. Adhering to and enforcing IT security policies is challenging and with this new feature we hope to simplify the process dramatically.
New Event Details for Admins - Click to Enlarge
Duplicate MAC Address Protection
Gears users will be happy to know that they are now protected from threats that seek to locate, infiltrate, or observe an authorized device by latching themselves on to its MAC address. Hackers can easily map out a network's MAC addresses and duplicate the addresses on their own device, giving them unregulated access to your protected network. In order to prevent this, Gears administrators are now notified in the event log if any Gears monitored device in their network has a duplicate MAC address.
Duplicate MAC Address Notifications - Click to Enlarge
If you're a business owner, you may imagine a clone lurking about your building completely undetected, siphoning out your information from one of your employee's patent meeting notes, partnership correspondences, or even taking a good hard look at the latest financials report you sent them. Like a cyber fly-on-the-wall, if one device has a duplicate MAC address, all server transmissions may potentially be rerouted to a device that has not been vetted by your security software; and that device may go undetected for days, weeks, or even months. Even absent of targeted MAC spoofing attacks like this, MAC collisions can happen accidentally when a network utilizes cloned virtual machines. OPSWAT Gears now provides visibility of this condition to give administrations more stability and security in their own network.
A Smaller, Faster Windows Agent
Those with Windows devices operating in their network will now be able to enjoy all of these new features while benefiting from the added performance of running a smaller, faster Gears agent. With this release, we have also reduced the install size for Windows devices by thirty percent and trimmed the running memory as well!
Improved Reports for Inventory and Infections
In the Reports and Notifications section of the Gears configuration pages, there are two options for downloading reports about your account. The inventory report has recently undergone an overhaul and now provides much more information about devices and their compliance status. For help reading the data in this report, please go to the knowledge base. In addition to the enhanced inventory report, there is now a report of infected devices. The infection report can be emailed automatically on a schedule, and both reports are provided in CSV format for easy manipulation in a spreadsheet or importing to a ticketing system.
Download Inventory and Infection Reports - Click to Enlarge
Other Enhancements & Fixes
- Firefox support for NAC for SaaS- Gears now supports all Firefox certificate integration for Mac and PC
- Differentiated remediation notifications for warnings and critical issues
- Cloud API Minor Version Change. The following APIs are upgraded to version 2.2 and now return "404 Not Found" when no device is found. Versions 2.0 and 2.1 were inconsistent.
