Cimcor
Ensuring Integrity, Security, and Compliance in Real-Time

2020 witnessed a massive uptick in the number of cyberattacks reported worldwide. Data breaches exposed over 36 billion records just in the first half of the year, breaking all records of data lost and sheer numbers of cyberattacks on companies, government, and individuals. Several tech giants, including Microsoft, General Electric, Facebook, and SolarWinds, were also seen conceding their networks before cybercriminals. Recent studies estimate a further rise in cyber incidents, with cybercrime costs expected to hit $6 trillion in 2021. Amid this alarming situation, organizations are still relying on conventional tools that generally take 206 days to identify a breach and another 73 days to contain it, making their ecosystem more vulnerable to such unprecedented incidents.

This is precisely where Cimcor makes a world of difference. The leading security and integrity software solution provider specializes in helping businesses identify and resolve security breaches in real-time, enabling them to protect their infrastructure from both external and internal threats. It serves as the frontline enabler of global corporate, government, and military initiatives to protect their IT infrastructure and spearheads in consistently bringing IT integrity innovations to market.

While conversing with the CIO Applications’ editorial team, Robert E. Johnson, III, the CEO of Cimcor, shares his insights on how the company leverages its expertise and experience to provide unrivaled cybersecurity services to its clients.

Could you give us a brief overview of Cimcor?

Cimcor is a global leader in delivering robust security, integrity, and compliance software solutions that help organizations ensure the integrity of their entire IT Infrastructure. Established in 1997 as a consulting service provider, we were focused on assisting our clients in automating their manufacturing facilities. Working with several prominent organizations back then, we realized that nothing more than a laptop, USB, or small set of skills is needed to disrupt their operations, even resulting in downtime. We then diverted our efforts toward finding potential ways to help organizations eliminate such unfortunate events. The result was CimTrak Industrial that helped identify unexpected changes that occur in their industrial control systems, ultimately empowering them to mitigate their operational risks.

Though CimTrak Industrial was a real game-changer, we’re a little early in the market with such a powerful tool specifically focused on manufacturing facilities’ industrial control systems. We then decided to make a complete overhaul in our business model and modify our solution to encompass both the operational technology and information technology side of things. This resulted in the development of our flagship product the CimTrak Integrity Suite.

Could you elaborate on the CimTrak Integrity Suite?

The CimTrak Integrity Suite serves as a complete portfolio of solutions needed to ensure integrity, security, compliance, and availability of their infrastructure. It helps organizations monitor and protect a wide range of physical, network, and virtual IT assets. Unlike a typical complicated and expensive File Integrity Management (FIM) solution, CimTrak offers a full-featured file integrity monitoring solution that is simple to install, configure, and manage.

Powered by next-gen file and system integrity monitoring, it helps identify crucial changes—zero-day attacks and unauthorized changes—to files, registries, databases, cloud servers, and different network devices, like firewalls, switches, and routers in real-time. With the CimTrak Integrity Suite Trusted File Registry™, a massive white-list database that features robust integration with ITSM workflow technologies and industry malware analysis engines, clients can quickly distinguish between good and bad changes within their infrastructure.

Furthermore, clients can gain a holistic view of their network by leveraging its unrivaled threat intelligence that helps gather accurate data, provide deep situational awareness, and deliver a detailed audit trail of the incident. Our solution is also designed with self-healing capabilities, helping take immediate, automatic action to remediate to a known, trusted, and operational state or simply prevent changes from happening completely. In short, we help protect their critical files and systems from all malicious or accidental changes capable of disrupting their critical IT infrastructure, threaten critical data, or cause non-compliance with regulations. Compliance is another aspect that CimTrak excels at. Our exceptional change management, auditing, and reporting capabilities enable clients to meet the most rigorous compliance mandates—including SOX, PCI, HIPAA, FFIEC, FISMA, NERCCIP, SWIFT, GDPR, CDM, CJIS, and many others.

What are some of the key factors that differentiate CimTrak?

In addition to security and compliance, CimTrak helps organizations create an operational workflow by automatically planning for and promoting good changes to their baseline with its state-of-the-art Ticketing Module. It serves as a fully integrated, bi-directional change ticketing system where information and commands can be executed through automation to ensure only approved changes are allowed. This allows organizations to minimize change noise, reconciliate expected changes with observed changes, and highlight unwanted, unauthorized, and unexpected activity resulting from circumvented processes or malicious activity. It easily integrates with our platform and automatically assigns tickets for changes, which can be tracked — from identification to final remediation — via our internal ticketing system or synced to an external ticketing system like ServiceNow, BMC, Atlassian Jira, and more.

With a wide range of such powerful functionalities and capabilities, our solution serves as a one-stop-shop solution for organizations of all sizes, including numerous Fortune 500 companies that fulfill their security, compliance, and system integrity needs. In fact, CimTrak is recognized as a first-of-its-kind solution suite that encompasses real-time integrity monitoring, integrated ticketing system, self-healing capabilities, and has Common Criteria certification. Another factor that sets the CimTrak Integrity Suite ahead of the competition is its ease of use.

Could you provide us with some case studies that exemplify Cimcor’s value proposition?

There’s no argument that our software serves as a solution of choice for several prominent players in today’s digital-first world. Cimcor recently collaborated with a large software-as-a-service organization that wanted to ensure the integrity of their infrastructure. We implemented our software into their ecosystem, helping them ensure their servers that have been spun up in the cloud were in a state of integrity. They have also used it to identify changes, track good changes, maintain an audit trail, and backup information for regulatory compliance affairs.

In another instance, Cimcor partnered with a company that was very close to failing a PCI audit. They needed to quickly implement change control in their organization to satisfy the requirements for PCI audit. Dedicated to helping them, we worked with them, installed and configured our solution within weeks, and helped them meet their PCI audit needs.

How does the future look for Cimcor?

We have a multi-pronged approach when it comes to our roadmap. First and foremost, we want to help businesses better understand change throughout the organizations. Cimcor is constantly looking for opportunities to identify components within an organizational ecosystem, connect with them, understand their status, and identify changes. And, we are on a drive to expand our portfolio of things that we can monitor for any unexpected changes. Aiming to help organizations that need to deal with multiple compliance frameworks, we are now building a library of compliances that allows users to identify their current status.