Once Bitten, Twice Protected

When a large financial organisation noticed and reported an intrusion from the Conficker worm, long-time IT outsourcing partner CSC worked side by side with the company’s IT security team to minimise the worm’s impact, restore full services, and protect the organisation for the future.

The “Conficker” worm had the potential to affect Active Directory accounts, lock out users, impact service availability and reduce the productivity of system users.

With a strong managed approach to system security, the incident was resolved within days, and closed in weeks, with a few additional precautions and reporting procedures implemented.

The Challenge

Operating in a strongly competitive market, it is essential that a large financial institution maintains a highly secure computing environment for its 4,000 staff across Australia.

Online services must be totally reliable to increase customer convenience and satisfaction and to support staff productivity.

The company has quite a complex IT environment, and takes a cautious and considered approach to system upgrades and expansions, always with the security of the environment and the stability of business applications at the forefront of discussions.

The Solutions

Both CSC and McAfee worked with the customer’s IT staff to identify potentially vulnerable endpoints (devices and applications), lock down account privileges, ensure that IT technical and logical controls were in place and enforced. These policies, when implemented across the network, serve to slow and block the propagation of any potential virus or worm in the enterprise.

CSC’s Managed Anti-Malware service provided a comprehensive centralised Anti-Malware and incident response capability to bring assurance and visibility that virus, malware, and malicious code were trapped, contained and cleaned.

The security team also made a number of recommendations to the company for ongoing management of non-standard and standard servers, and these were accepted and implemented.

Cyberconfidence™ encompasses three key elements – describing how successfully an organisation has implemented enterprise information security processes, and how this impacts business agility and stakeholder trust.

The Results

CSC’s Managed Anti-Malware service protects a network of approximately 5,000 endpoints and servers for 4,000 of the company’s staff in multiple Australian locations.

Centralised management has contributed to improved compliance and availability of devices and access points, increased the speed of our response and resolution to new viruses or variants, and provides visibility of compliance gaps across the enterprise.

This visibility, supported by user friendly compliance reporting from CSC, helps the company’s management team to reduce infection potential and non-compliance issues, and provides an effective framework for security incident response to any virus or worm.

The service is integrated into existing incident management processes, providing support for effective decision making, and contributing to improved overall response and endpoint management across the organisation.