Justin Manifold of Vermeer Corporation talks about Zero Networks

Summary

Vermeer Corporation needed a virtual air gap to better protect its network, and Senior IT Security Engineer Justin Manifold found it in Zero Networks. He explains how agentless deployment on the native Windows firewall got Vermeer to full enforcement fast, how 30 days of automated learning produced rules with almost no false positives, and how Vermeer is extending segmentation and MFA to shop-floor IoT, OT, and network devices.

Key takeaways

• “Too good to be true” turned out to be true. After seeing the demo, Justin thought Zero Networks was too simple. In production, reaching full enforcement on Vermeer’s computers was “like a dream came true.”
• Agentless deployment is fast. Zero Networks uses the firewall built into Windows to control what’s allowed and denied between hosts, so both the POC and production rollout moved quickly.
• Thirty days of learning produced accurate rules. Building real policy from 30 days of network data by hand is “almost impossible.” Zero Networks’ automated engine did it with almost zero false positives or false negatives.
• MFA protects elevated tasks. End users must pass MFA before reaching protected servers and network devices, a layer Vermeer never had. The dashboard also surfaced an attack on a remote user’s home network.
• Shop-floor devices are segmented. IoT and OT devices that can’t protect themselves are blocked from talking to endpoints, and network equipment that relied on usernames and passwords now gets MFA and device-level access limits.

Speaker: Justin Manifold, Senior IT Security Engineer, Vermeer Corporation

How did Vermeer react to Zero Networks?

Justin Manifold: So when we first were looking at Zero Networks and we saw the demo, we went through the sales conversation and the engineering, I walked away saying, “Hey, this is, this is too good to be true. This is way too simple, way too easy.” We put it in production, and after we got it up and running and we were able to go into full enforcement on our computers, it was, it was like a dream came true.

My name is Justin Manifold, Senior IT Security Engineer here at Vermeer Corporation. We build, design, and support high quality industrial and agriculture equipment, which we commonly call around here yellow iron.

Why did Vermeer need a virtual air gap?

Justin Manifold: Our biggest challenge was, what can we find for virtual air gap solution that would allow us to protect our network better than we are doing today? And when we started looking at different solutions, we saw how simple and how efficient that the Zero Networks solution was going to be. And so as we began that journey, we were really ready to understand how quickly we were going to be able to deploy this, both in the POC and in production.

How does agentless microsegmentation deploy so quickly?

Justin Manifold: And why I say it’s so quick is it’s an agentless solution, so it’s relying on the, the network firewall that’s native to Windows, which allows us to control both allows and denies to the, the PC or the host that the connections are going between. And then on top of that, you have the learning that goes on within the Zero Networks, and so they have the automatic engine that is learning and taking that data and translate it into rules, and those rules are what determines what’s allowed and what’s blocked.

How accurate is automated policy learning?

Justin Manifold: When I think back to how would I do that on my own — we’ve tried to learn some things about our network over a course of a period of time, and to learn in 30 days and actually put that into a real policy is almost impossible. So Zero Networks takes the information over that course of 30 days, learns about the devices, and says, “Hey, this is what you need, what you don’t need,” and the amount of false positives or false negatives that have come out of that have been almost zero.

How does MFA protect elevated tasks?

Justin Manifold: So we’re letting the learning provide those rules to us so that we can put devices in that protected state, which will allow traffic to go freely that needs to for normal everyday operations, and for those elevated important tasks that need to be done by an end user to a server, to a network device, that’s being protected by that multi-factor authentication. So that’s another layer that we have not had before, so that’s been a real big win.

What threats has Zero Networks surfaced?

Justin Manifold: Another interesting thing that came up a couple weeks ago: we had a home user that we detected within our Zero Networks dashboard that was having — I would almost say it was an attack to their computer on their home network. And so Zero Networks was able to bubble that up and let us see that, and so we were able to fix that.

How is Vermeer securing IoT, OT, and network devices?

Justin Manifold: As we continue our journey with Zero Networks, IoT, OT, and network devices are something that we’re really looking at to lock down. A lot of that’s obviously on our shop floor, as a manufacturing company. A lot of those devices cannot be protected, and so that really creates a problem on how do we protect and segment those devices. We brought Zero Networks in, we were able to put those devices into a policy that stops those devices from talking to the endpoints, so that’s been a huge win.

And same thing when we look at our network equipment as well. A lot of those are protected with typical username and password, and once we have put Zero Networks, it allows them to have multi-factor authentication, and also, we can limit which devices can talk to the network and equipment as needed.