Mcafee, Inc.

Preventsys, Inc.

Stephen J Ritter

Ryan Tadashi Nakawatase

Sven Schrecker

John M Payne

John Leslie Williams

Brian Costello

John Patrick Ravenel

John Pelly

M Celeste Rutherford

Thomas Paul Walpole

John Payne

Rayan Tadashi Nakawatase

A prevention-based network auditing system includes a central compliance server providing a user interface allowing a user to schedule and configure a network audit. The configured audit is stored in an audit repository until its scheduled time. At such a time, the compliance server automatically invokes one or more audit servers to gather information about the network. The compliance server receives the gathered information and electronically applies a network policy to the information for determining compliance with the policy. A remediation task may be generated if the policy has been violated, and the task monitored until its completion.

System and method for automated policy audit and remediation management

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for asset risk analysis. One method includes receiving threat definition data for threats, vulnerability detection data for assets, and countermeasure detection data for assets. The method further includes determining a respective risk metric for each of the assets for each of the threats. This includes analyzing the vulnerability detection data for an asset to determine whether the asset is vulnerable to a threat, determining from the threat definition data and the countermeasure detection data whether the asset is protected by one of the countermeasures identified for the threat, and determining the risk metric for the asset for the threat according to whether the asset is vulnerable to the threat and whether the asset is protected by one of the countermeasures identified for the threat.

Asset risk analysis

A security metrics system receives security information data for a network system of computers and metric definitions from metric sources. Each metric definition defines a heuristic for calculating a score for the network system from one or more security signal values at a time in the plurality of times, wherein the score quantifies a security metric for the network system. The system calculates each metric definition for a plurality of times and selecting metric definitions that are related to the performance of and are indicative of one or more other metric definitions as candidates to be key performance indicators.

Identifying relationships between security metrics

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for prioritizing asset remediations. One method includes generating a risk metric for an asset and a threat, generating a remediation availability metric for the asset and the threat, and determining a remediation prioritization metric for the asset and the threat according to the risk metric and the remediation availability metric. The remediation prioritization metric specifies a priority of applying the remediation to the asset.

Prioritizing asset remediations

A prevention-based network auditing system includes a central compliance server generating network policies and configuring audits of the data communications network. The compliance server presents a graphical user interface (GUI) to describe the specific data gathering parameters, policies to be analyzed, and the schedule of analysis. One or more audit servers strategically deployed around the network employ heterogeneous data-gathering tools to gather information about the network in response to the configured audits, and transmit the gathered information to the compliance server. An audit repository stores the gathered information for use by the compliance server for security and regulatory policy assessment, network vulnerability analysis, report generation, and security improvement recommendations.

Network audit and policy assurance system

A prevention-based network auditing system includes a central compliance server storing both natural language policy documents and machine-processable policy rules in an audit repository. The compliance server provides a client-side user interface allowing a user to easily generate a machine-auditable policy by selecting/generating a natural language policy source document, and linking the applicable machine-processable policy rules to the applicable portions of the source document. The selected machine-processable policy rules are then applied to information gathered about the network during a scheduled network audit session for efficiently and systematically determining whether policy violations and/or vulnerabilities exist.

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Solana Beach, CA, United States of America

Stephen J Ritter