Active Software Management with Altiris

At FYRE, we believe that your clients and servers should be well managed. This significantly increases the security of your IT infrastructure.

An important part of this is active software management. Here is a short story to illustrate what we mean by this.

A few weeks ago, there was a significant security incident with the well-known remote maintenance tool Teamviewer. The vulnerability CVE-2020-13699 allowed an attacker to gain remote access to Windows computers, even without a password. This vulnerability affects all Teamviewer versions prior to version 15.8.3. Teamviewer is installed on more than 2 billion devices worldwide.

Optimally, you would not have many versions of a software installed in your environment. In a perfect environment, you would have a maximum of two: the old version that you want to replace and the new version that you want to use to replace the old version.

But in reality it is not always like that. It may well be that you have versions 11, 12, 13, 14 and also 15 of Teamviewer in use.

To fix the Teamviewer vulnerability, you have to eliminate all the old versions.

With the Altiris Software Catalog you can find out which versions you have installed in your environment. This information is provided by the Altiris inventory.

To update to the latest version of Teamviewer, you need a software package that installs the latest version fully automatically with the correct parameters. It also configures the desired settings.

With Teamviewer, for example, you can use configuration to automatically assign the client to the Teamviewer account. Further settings can be specified in the configuration file.

The next step is to test this created software package and check whether the settings are applied correctly.

In order to successfully roll out the new Teamviewer package, the old installed versions must first be uninstalled.

This means that an uninstall command is needed for all old versions. These old versions will then all be uninstalled first in the directive for installing the new Teamviewer version.

Active software management takes time. In return, it protects you from today’s threats from the Internet. Many attacks from the Internet can only be carried out because of known vulnerabilities in software.

FYRE Consulting can help you to build up or run an active software management. Talk to us, we always find a solution!

Links:
Heise.de → https://www.heise.de/news/TeamViewer-Fernwartungstool-wies-gefaehrliche-Schwachstelle-auf-4866337.html (in German)
CVE-2020-13699 → https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2020-13699