Tango/04 Overhauls OS/400 Security Agent with Version 2

by Alex Woodie

Tango/04 Computing Group last week unveiled a new version of its iSeries Security Agent, a security-auditing and alerting tool designed to augment network security and intrusion detection systems. With Version 2.0, Tango/04 has delivered an abundance of enhancements, including new reports, expanded coverage of security and event details, a new installation wizard, and a new event-processing engine, which, Tango/04 says, provides complete coverage of internal OS/400 security events.

The iSeries Security Agent is an optional component of Tango/04's flagship product suite, the Visual Message Center, which is a collection of message and performance management products for OS/400 and Microsoft Windows servers. Tango/04 launched the iSeries Security Agent last August, to give administrators a real-time view into system security activity, and particularly user behavior.

User security is the main focus of the iSeries Security Agent. The software continually monitors the activities of users--whether they're malevolent troublemakers or unwitting bumblers--and analyzes their behavioral patterns through advanced pattern-matching technology. If the user takes a particularly nasty turn, like lowering the iSeries security level from 50 to 30, the product also has the capability, via the Visual Message Center, to automatically kick off a series of commands that reverse the change, disable the user, and perform any number of other moves.

With iSeries Security Agent 2.0, Tango/04 has delivered what it calls a breakthrough in iSeries security technology. Tango/04 says the product now provides complete coverage of internal OS/400 security events, which includes coverage of more than 70 different actions and 500 different events. Version 2.0 adds a number of new supported capabilities, including the capability to monitor events occurring in WebSphere and in Java programs, clustered applications, and objects residing in the OS/400 Integrated File System (IFS) and native objects. The product also has new network configuration capabilities and has a new event monitoring engine that Tango/04 says can process 500,000 events per hour, even small iSeries servers.

The updated product also includes a new reporting system. With this release, users can create customized "parametric" reports based on the occurrence of a number of events, such as the execution of commands by a power user, access to sensitive files, the creation of a user profile, rejected passwords, changes to system values, usage of sensitive tools such as SST, DFU, and interactive SQL, and other activities which could be dangerous or indicate malicious intent.

While the new product features more powerful monitoring capabilities, set-up and configuration is easier, Tango/04 says. This product includes a new Configuration Wizard, and a new Graphical Rule Editor makes it easier to program the tool to respond appropriately to malicious or suspicious user activity, on one or multiple systems. The software also features new advanced filtering capabilities to weed out unwanted event collection. No security expertise is required to use the product, the company says.

Finally, the product's user interface has been enhanced to communicate the expanded event coverage, and provide more detail of events than previous releases, as well. Users interact with the iSeries Security Agent through the SmartConsole, a Windows-based program that lies at the heart of the Visual Message Center suite. This release also features enhancements in its real-time alert capabilities, to improve the handling of event escalation, and enhance its support for sending alerts to wireless devices, such as cell phones and PDAs.

The iSeries Security Agent 2.0 is available now. The software supports OS/400 V3R7 and later versions, and can be integrated alongside network security product such as PowerTech Group's PowerLock product (which Tango/04 resells in Europe) or as a stand-alone product. For more information or a free demo, go to www.tango.04.com, or go to the Web site of Tango/04's primary North American reseller, SoftLanding Systems.

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