Forescout Technologies launches free threat hunting service

Forescout Technologies has announced the launch of Forescout Frontline, a new threat hunting service utilising a team of trained cybersecurity analysts.

Forescout states this is designed to support cybersecurity teams by proactively identifying risks, enabling accelerated incident response and maturing security posture.

According to the company, Forescout is offering this complimentary service for organisations that lack the internal resources and visibility to defend themselves from cybersecurity attacks, including ransomware and advanced persistent threats (APT).

Vice president of threat defence for Forescout, Shawn Taylor, says, "Cybersecurity attacks are on the rise. Simultaneously, cybersecurity teams are perennially understaffed and under-resourced. This has created a perfect storm.

"Organisations are under immense pressure to cope with the scale and speed of attacks and the havoc caused by the adversaries. Forescout is launching this new service to help organisations defend against attacks by providing a complete and holistic view of their assets."

Many organisations use multiple security tools across multiple teams to help identify threats and risks. However, insights may be limited due to siloed views of IT, IoT, IoMT or OT assets, the company states.

Typically, a variety of these asset types exist across an organisations digital terrain and are often interconnected, which means cybersecurity risk must be identified and tackled holistically.

Delivered by Forescout Frontline analysts, the Threat Hunting and Risk Identification Service overcomes staffing resources and asset visibility challenges to uncover threats and identify risks that may otherwise remain undiscovered.

Overall, the company states Forescout Frontline will help organisations:

• Discover, validate and prioritise a wide variety of cyber threats and vulnerabilities across all assets, including IT, IoT, IoMT and OT
• Analyse the context and risk associated with all findings
• Leverage the comprehensive insights to develop effective risk mitigation and remediation strategies

A State of Florida Agency, which supports several key Florida departments, engaged Forescout Frontline to understand each instance of Log4j, a zero-day vulnerability in a Java logging framework, across the organisation's 220 sites in 16 divisions.

According to the company, in less than a day and a half, Forescout Frontline delivered insights into thousands of assets with vulnerabilities such as Log4j and Windows-based PrintNightmare.

Additionally, hundreds of Critical CVSS-rated vulnerabilities affecting infrastructure devices such as switches and routers were found. Finally, actionable intelligence concerning critical embedded IoT TCP-IP stack-based instances such as NUCLEUS: 13 and RIPPLE 20, insecure communications, and other risks were also discovered. Leveraging this free service reduced time to mitigation and remediation of these security gaps and improved overall security posture.

Overall, the company states that Forescout Frontline aims to level the cybersecurity playing field by operationalising the vulnerability research and threat intelligence produced by Forescout's Vedere Labs and utilising the Forescout Continuum Platform to provide threat hunting services across multiple dimensions.

Forescout Frontline analysts include former public sector and private sector threat hunters with training in threat detection and incident response.