Securing Static Vulnerable Devices

Many computing devices today are deployed with a static configuration that cannot be modified. Some are due to governance restrictions (e.g., FDA-approved medical devices) while others are legacy systems or embedded devices. This excludes these devices from operating system, anti-virus, and application updates that would normally be used to protect them. As a result, these devices are increasingly vulnerable to compromise. Since most of these devices have to communicate with other production systems, segmentation has had limited success in protecting them. Due to advances in unified threat management firewalls, it is now possible to protect these devices from malware while still maintaining the required static configuration. If properly configured for virtual networks (VLANS), the firewall can be leveraged to protect thousands of insecure devices.