Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives
Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation
From: Dexter Caldwell <Dexter.Caldwell () FURMAN EDU>
Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 12:14:25 -0400
I'd have to second that. Even though we're researching our options, I have to say ePO 4.x is extroardinarly powerful. I went from practically choking on epo3.6.x to actually liking epo 4+. When I actually compare it to the other AV packages we've considered thus far, they are clearly less flexible on the management side, but of course management is not the only variable to think of so we're keeping an open mind when it comes to desktop performance etc. Mcafee 8.7i made some performance improvements and the new Mac version runs much better too. With ePO, I can do thinkg like automatically tag, classify, report or organize machines based on everything from OS and OS version to subnet, or almost any generally useful computer property you can imagine. Correlation with userame, mac address, ip and computername is also done automatically and clients can be located by by these. But more importantly once you spend an hour or so figuring out the dashboards and queries you can do things like setup graphs to display infections or malware rates per subnet, buidling or whatever your logical network topology will allow you to define. It can gives you a way to keep users where they are supposed to be grouped at any point in time. (For example with other av, I can't automatically move users to the right group efficiently.) It's most useful for me to group users by subnet. When you have a NAC that uses vlan switching or remediation subnets to install the AV and manage access this becomes a potential issue. Once in production and their IP changes the students are no longer a member of that subnet in which they installed the AV. With ePO, because it updates all parameters on every communication (interval determined by you), your clients can be organized much more efficiently than systems that require you to manually move users. Having command-line options install options for grouping helps, but not all we've tested have this option. One thorn in my side with Mcafee though is that they do not provide to my knowledge a simple integrated tool to spit out a simple installer file for pc and mac users so we must make our own installer/uninstaller packages. There's no reason for this level of extra effort. I don't like the recommended install from an SMB share idea recommendation of many vendors because we use NAC (which is web-oriented) and smb shares are not the same thing as web pages or web shares so we need single file installers since our students' computers are not joined to a domain therefore they cannot access shares and we cannot not push installers to them. Even open shares require some credentials which adds unnecessary complexity in directions. Other AV vendors make this a tad easier by providing you an ability to spit out an install file. The "Universal " installers (ex, Mcafee shell script installer) for unix makes good sense for programmers, but it makes no sense for the legions of Mac users who got Macs in the first place because they thought PCs were complicated and clumsy. Requiring them to use terminal and sudo and know how to change to some obscure case-senitive directory to install or uninstall something they could do with a wizard makes zero sense to me. (Okay, I'm off my soapbox now) D/C The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv <SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU> writes:
In our testing of Sophos it was a solid product. The huge downside for us was that we were trying to manage multiple domains (still > 8) via a single central management server. Epolicy Orchestrator makes this fairly easy, one has to have a user account on each domain that can iterate the OU/Computer structure (a guest user is generally sufficient), then configure things to update at a reasonable interval. Sophos uses the computer account of the enterprise console server to synchronize the OU/Computer structure. Since a computer can't be a direct member of multiple domains, this wouldn't work for our configuration. Initially, Sophos recommended that we simply run one management console per domain (not likely), then later offered to write us some scripts (or provide us, more likely) that would do an out of band pull of this information from the domains, then import it into the Sophos Console. After some discussions, that seemed like a good way to break things very effectively as each new version is released, and we continued our relationship with McAfee. In fairness to McAfee: Epolicy Orchestrator, with little effort, is an extraordinary centralized management and reporting system. Yes, it's Java based (runs a Tomcat server on the back end, so it's a resource hog on the server and can be slow-ish at times on the front end), but in spite of that ePO 4.5 (the latest version) runs pretty well until you load it up with 40 million events (and even then it was our very old and underpowered SQL server that fell over). We're in the process of reorganizing our AD structure to reduce the number of domains and forests that we have, so Sophos (or some other vendor with similar limitations) is again a possibility. <rant> Last, one comment in case managers are still reading: Management of Antivirus software _needs_ to be pulled out of the security office. This software, like any other endpoint management software, needs to be run by those that are providing centralized IT resources for endpoint management. Security needs to be involved in helping make the risk decisions related to what default settings should be enabled and should be able to leverage any centralized logs resulting from any endpoint management system, but should not be responsible for managing these systems. As an additional point, WSUS is just another endpoint management system. </rant> -- KS On 5/3/10 9:10 PM, "Eric Case" <ecase () EMAIL ARIZONA EDU> wrote:I will also give Sophos a thumbs up. The University of Arizona has site-licensed Sophos. However, being decentralized colleges and departments are free to spend ³their²money ondifferent solutions. I know one Associate Dean who was using McAfee in³homeuser mode² until it came time to renew last month and went with adifferentfree AV tool. He could have used Sophos but . . . you would have toknow him.:) As Ronald said, from the admin/management side Sophos is very easy toworkwith. With the Enterprise Console (EC), it was easy to see the currentstateof all the clients (and report that up the Dean), setup email alerts,etc.,etc. If there is one drawback to Sophos it is it was written from day-onefor theadmin/management viewpoint, not the end-users viewpoint. What I meanis itwas written for centralized management not end-user management. I¹mnot sureSophos sells to end-users. The enterprise characteristics were notbolted onto a consumer product. As an example, it was designed to update from a ³Central Installation Directory² (CID), not a vendor website. You can publish that locationviahttp and have your users update from there when your CID is notavailable. Myusers were able to get updates from my CID while they were on adifferentcontinent. Another thing that is different about Sophos is the updates. Insteadof onemassing update a day, the individual virus definitions are published as needed. You could have many updates in one day. They are ACSII files;youcould fax them, type them back into the computer and update the engine.Themain AV engine is updated once a month. In addition, a single updatecancover more than one piece of malware. If you want some machines toupdateonce a day and others to update every hour, no problem, the EC has youcoveredwith different groups. If you assume, all AVs are close to each other in terms of detection,i.e.,one is not twice as fast/better than the others, what will set themapart istheir management, cost and support. I would say Sophos; ³tastesgreat, lessfilling.² :) -Eric Eric Case, CISSP eric (at) ericcase (dot) com http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericcase From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of King, Ronald A. Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 2:12 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: Re: [SECURITY] Centralized Antivirus Recommendation I compared McAfee, Symantec and Sophos a few years back. We choseSophosbased on its ease of management compared to the other two. As for performance, Sophos appeared to perform better. The only thing wereally seeis when the system first starts up and Sophos immediately updatesitself, but,this usually isn¹t too intense. I am in the process of moving toEnterpriseConsole 4 from 3.5 and then to Endpoint Security 9 from 7. Base on the documentation, it looks really easy. Management is much easier and faster with Sophos. I think that is what impressed me the most. While others are going with a web basedmanagementusing Java, they suffer from a serious performance degradation. McAfeehadthings missing dependent on the browser you used. When we had Confickerhitus, we were able to quickly respond. If we used one of the others, Idon¹tthink it would have gone as well (as well as a virus outbreak could).We haveone of our OUs for labs tied directly to a management group and a grouppolicybased install for anything new that is tied to Active Directory. Support has always been great. We had 8 or 10 hours of help, maybemore,deploying. They helped design our standalone client for off-siteinstalls,assisted in active directory integration, and gave tips for workingwith theMS SQL DB backend. For general support, they are very fast at gettingback toyou if you call and leave a message. Most of our stuff goes throughemail andis usually taken care of in a day. For the Conficker issue I referredtoearlier, they spent a good amount of time helping to include educatingme onhow the bugger worked. The only thing we have had to deal with is an add-on for IE. Though Ihaven¹thad any issues, there have been others that disable the web add-on toresolvetheir issue. EC 4 and Endpoint 9 have the ability to turn this off.I¹mhoping there is functionality to allow and disallow options for it. One thing we are really excited about in the new release is the software control and PII scanning. I¹ve had limited experience with the other three, which includes nonefrom acentralized management standpoint. But, for what it¹s worth, ESETtended toblock legit apps by default. AVG has so many components, including thewebscanner that it has slowed down systems. I no longer recommend thefreebie.Kapersky, I have no experience with. Anyway, these are my 2 cents based on what we have dealt with for 2years. Weare renewing for at least another one and have no plans to change.Sometimesit¹s good to be kept out of the papers. Feel free to contact me for any further information of list. Ronald King Security Engineer Norfolk State University Marie V. McDemmond Center for Applied Research Suite 401 700 Park Ave. Norfolk, Virginia 23504 Phone: 757-823-3918 Fax: 757-823-2128 Email: raking () nsu edu<mailto:raking () nsu edu> http://security.nsu.edu From: The EDUCAUSE Security Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU] On Behalf Of Sabourin, Justin Sent: Monday, May 03, 2010 4:01 PM To: SECURITY () LISTSERV EDUCAUSE EDU Subject: [SECURITY] Centralized Antivirus Recommendation We¹re currently researching options to move away from our currentantivirussolution in favor of something with better detection abilities and asolidmanagement console/reporting server. We¹re also a technology centric institution so the performance impacts of antivirus clients arefrequentlynoted by our students so low overhead is also desirable. Currently we¹re considering the following based on other feedback.Yourthoughts on installation, deployment, and management are muchappreciated!· Sophos · AVG · ESET · Kapersky Justin Sabourin * Manager of Network Operations * Division of Technology Services * Wentworth Institute of Technology * 550 Huntington Ave,Boston MA02115 CONFIDENTIALITY: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorized disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this e-mail in error,pleasenotify the sender and delete this e-mail from your system.
Current thread:
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation, (continued)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Mark Rogowski (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Eme Ejike (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Alex Keller (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Dexter Caldwell (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Valdis Kletnieks (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Lanham, Sean (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation King, Ronald A. (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Jay Fowler (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Eric Case (May 03)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Schoenefeld, Keith (May 04)
- Re: Centralized Antivirus Recommendation Dexter Caldwell (May 04)