Re: Home laptops on a corporate network

["Christopher Kelley" <christopherkelley () hotmail com>]

Keep in mind the original question.... We are talking about PERSONAL laptops 
here. Doing all of these things to non-company assets is unfeasable. Not to 
mention, you would be liable if a patch rendered the system (or any part of 
it) unuseable, or if the employee was no longer able to install things to 
the system, or whatever. This could be reduced by an agressive AUP/EULA, but 
in the end the risk is most definately NOT worth the reward.

You need to think about all the things that this laptop would encounter, and 
how you would safeguard the EPHI that is on the system. It is just not 
possible with a non-company asset.

Heck, it is hard enough with a _company_ owned asset.

Trust me on this, your client and your client's IT people will be very 
thankful in the long run if you squash this right now.


From: gjgowey () tmo blackberry net
Reply-To: gjgowey () tmo blackberry net
To: "Petter Bruland" <pbruland () fcglv com>, listbounce () securityfocus com,     
   christopherkelley () hotmail com, security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Home laptops on a corporate network
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 23:42:17 +0000
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One of the advantages of using SMS for patch management is you can force a 
patch scan and push as soon as they connect to the network (vpn, dial up, or 
regular).  SMS is a pain to configure for patch management, but it's worth 
it.

Geoff
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless handheld.

-----Original Message-----
From: "Petter Bruland" <pbruland () fcglv com>
Date: Tue, 8 May 2007 10:51:40
To:<christopherkelley () hotmail com>, <security-basics () securityfocus com>
Subject: RE: Home laptops on a corporate network

Totally agree, not recommended.

Earlier we had some posts about patch management, and from what I
gathered, you could get some control by using PatchLink. Although, that
does not protect you 100%, you could place the VPN users on their own
VLAN where you can restrict the amount of access to internal
servers/services.

I've seen a different "solution" (not sure how much of a solution that
is) where the firewall is a high end Sonicwall, like the 4060 etc, and
the VPN clients were terminated to their own LAN segment. Then the
Sonicwall would use it's Security Services (Content filter, gateway AV,
Client AV enforcement, anti-spy ware, intrusion prevention) to filter
traffic between the VPN users and the rest of the network.

Also I'm not too familiar with the restrictions of HIPAA and SOX, so the
above might not event be "allowed" according to HIPAA/SOX.

I think this is a very common scenario, so any feedback (NOT FLAMING) is
appreciated.

-Petter

-----Original Message-----
From: listbounce () securityfocus com [mailto:listbounce () securityfocus com]
On Behalf Of christopherkelley () hotmail com
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 10:12 AM
To: security-basics () securityfocus com
Subject: Re: Home laptops on a corporate network

I'd recommend NOT doing this. Especially if you are trying comply with
HIPAA. Keep in mind that you will have little to no management
capability over these personal laptops, which means you have no ability
to verify patch level and AV update on these machines that may have EPHI
on them. Not to mention the fact that these employees are probably
taking them home and plugging them into their home networks, where they
(or their kids) are running bearshare, gnutella, grokster, bitorrent,
and surfing to unfiltered web sites. Not only does this mean that they
are potentially exposing critical data in this manner, it also means
they are bringing potentially infested computers into the soft chewy
center of your network.


Whenever you have an employee with a laptop, you create a liability to
your network, allowing them to use personal laptops presents an even
bigger liability. IMHO, this level of risk is unacceptable, especially
from a HIPAA compliance standpoint.

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