Fechheimer’s Security Success Story with Blumira

Fechheimer is a uniform manufacturing company, producing uniforms for police, military, EMS, and public safety organizations. Founded in 1842, Fechheimer is a Berkshire Hathaway company with global resources and partners in Central and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia that complement their three plants in the United States.

The Challenge: Limited Team, Lack of Visibility

With a limited team of security and IT staff, Vice President of IT Steve Gatton is responsible for both IT/security strategy as well as a lot of hands-on work at Fechheimer. This made day-to-day operations more challenging with limited resources and time.

At Fechheimer, Gatton was using a variety of out-of-the-box services for threat detection and log management, but none of them had very good log aggregation, and they lacked visibility and proper alerting.

The Solution: Blumira’s Advanced Threat Detection

Fechheimer’s first pentest highlighted many security gaps for the company. Based on the findings from the test, Gatton was able to make quite a few changes within the company and wanted to ensure they were working. With the help of Blumira, Gatton was able to follow up, test and validate that Blumira’s platform was identifying security events as well as providing the alerting and security value that they were seeking.

According to Gatton, Fechheimer deployed Blumira in less than a week, allowing them to realize a very short time-to-value while immediately getting alerted on security findings that other tools missed.

“Security is a never-ending battle, as new vulnerabilities come out and new patches need to be applied,” said Fechheimer Network Administrator Kelly Cardona. “Deploying Blumira has helped open our eyes to threats that were unnoticed to the naked eye.”

With Blumira, Fechheimer was able to gain more insight into their environment, including firewall attacks and failovers, user logins, internal network scanning and identifying null session/hashing attacks. They find the greatest value in having a set of expert eyes monitoring logs and alerting them when they have a potential threat.

“We know more about what’s going on in our network and security stack,” said Gatton. ‘That awareness has helped us actually obtain more funding for our budget – when you have visibility, it’s easy to get more money to help protect or support the organization.”

There were additional incidents that Blumira alerted Fechheimer to, including scanning of their systems, that they would otherwise not have insight into.

Real Value: The People Behind Blumira

“Compared to other vendors, the ability to get someone that knows what they’re talking about is invaluable,” said Gatton. “We work really well with Blumira’s engineering team and value the accessibility to Blumira’s support staff and the brains behind the platform.”

As Fechheimer has had new requirements, Blumira is able to help them customize detections, workflows and reports to help them identify key aspects of their systems. They find value in the speed and urgency of Blumira’s proactive alerts to cybersecurity threats.

“The people behind Blumira make it really valuable for us,” said Gatton. “It feels more like a partnership vs. just a customer-vendor relationship.”

Fechheimer leverages Blumira’s dashboards, prioritized alerts and flexibility of being able to send alerts via different communication channels, such as email, text and phone calls.

“With some of these other platforms, you’re left on your own a lot with minimal support,” said Gatton. “We don’t have the team or enough time to be able to do that.”

Strategic Value For Small Security Teams

Subsequent pen tests have resulted in significant improvements, proving Fechheimer had greatly reduced their surface exposure with the help of Blumira. After integrating Blumira with Crowdstrike’s endpoint monitoring, Fechheimer was also able to cut through the noise of too many alerts.

“Other tools are noisy; we don’t have time to dig through layers and layers of data,” said Gatton. “Blumira does a good job summarizing detections and giving us advice on how to remediate.”

Blumira’s platform is set to alert Fechheimer by email and text of any attacks – allowing their network administrator to quickly take next steps to resolve any findings.

“I can log into the Blumira portal to view events and details. This allows me to act by blocking IP address ranges on our firewall or by blocking the MAC address of any internal scans. The events are very detailed, containing source IP, users (if password spraying), destination applications, protocols being exploited and remediation steps to block the threat,” said Cardona.

Blumira’s platform provides value through contextual alerts and automated threat response, giving Fechheimer suggestions through pre-built security playbooks that guide them through remediation.

“Having that guidance for people that aren’t living and breathing security all day because they have other things to do to run the business is very helpful,” said Gatton.

Since Fechheimer provides uniforms to the U.S. military, Blumira can also help Fechheimer meet new compliance requirements for federal contractors, including CMMC (Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification), which applies to all federal contractors. That includes companies within the supply chain such as small businesses, commercial item contractors and foreign suppliers.