File integrity monitoring (FIM) is a critical security control that helps organizations detect system changes in real-time that indicate impacts to compliance and potential cybersecurity incidents, empowering teams to respond rapidly. FIM is required by many major compliance standards such as North American Electric Reliability Corporation Critical Infrastructure Protection (NERC CIP), the...

File integrity monitoring (FIM) is used to detect and correct unauthorized system changes that may be indicators of compromise. As the inventors of FIM, Fortra’s Tripwire has a multi-decade track record of helping organizations that want to reduce cyber risk and achieve system integrity to avoid security breaches and audit fines. This toolkit is a collection of helpful resources such as articles,...

Whether you are new to information security, or you’re a long-time practitioner, it seems that “zero trust” is the latest initiative at the top of everyone’s priority list. Special Publication 800-207, created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers guidance for instituting a zero trust architecture. The document outlines the basic tenets that form the foundation of...

File integrity monitoring (FIM) is the cybersecurity process that monitors and detects changes in your environment to alert you to threats and helps you remediate them. While monitoring environments for change sounds simple enough, there are plenty of misconceptions about how exactly FIM fits into a successful cybersecurity program. It’s essential to address those common myths now so that...

There’s a lot more to file integrity monitoring than simply detecting change. Although FIM is a common policy requirement, there are many FIM capabilities and processes you can elect to implement or not. These can vary from a simple “checkbox” compliance tool to the option to build effective security and operational controls. These decisions directly affect the value your organization gains from...

File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) is a technology that monitors for changes in files that may indicate a cyberattack. In many organizations, however, FIM mostly means noise: too many changes, no context around these changes, and little insight into whether a detected change actually poses a risk. What does file integrity monitoring do? FIM, and often referred to as “change audit” was around long...

A key security challenge is finding and rooting out malware that has already become embedded on key assets. Organizations today have myriad threat intelligence sources to leverage. However, simply getting the intelligence into your organization is not enough. Unless you have a way to operationalize myriad threat intelligence sources to make it actionable and useful, threat intelligence just...