Last week, Symantec Malaysia announced its new Disarm technology in Symantec Messaging Gateway and the addition of Network Threat Protection in Symantec Endpoint Protection for Mac computers.
[Symantec Malaysia’s New Country Director, Josephine Hoh (R) and Principal Consultant, David Rajoo (L)]
“One of the main concerns for Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and IT managers today is safeguarding their organisations against evolving targeted attacks, which have become an established part of the threat landscape,” said Josephine Hoh, Country Director, Symantec Malaysia.
“The new technologies, combined with our comprehensive solution portfolio, will protect organisations in Malaysia from threats at the gateway, on the endpoint and in the data centre,” she added.
Developed by Symantec Research Labs, Symantec’s advanced research division, the new Disarm technology in Symantec Messaging Gateway 10.5 uses a first-of-a-kind technique to protect companies from targeted attacks. Most targeted attacks are now delivered in the form of malicious, but seemingly innocuous, documents delivered over email. Each such malicious document, e.g., a PDF, DOC or XLS file, contains an embedded attack, and when a victim simply views the document, their computer is automatically and silently compromised.
Traditional protection technologies attempt to scan documents for suspicious characteristics. The problem is that many of these document-based attacks are purposefully crafted so they don’t look suspicious, and as a result, they go undetected.
“Disarm technology takes a whole new approach. Instead of scanning the document, it essentially makes a digital harmless carbon copy of every incoming email attachment/document, delivering this carbon copy to the recipient, rather than the original, potentially malicious document. The result is that the recipient is never exposed to the attacker’s malicious attachment,” said David Rajoo, Principal Consultant, Symantec Malaysia.
According to Symantec research, the Disarm technology would have blocked 98 percent of attacks that exploit zero-day document vulnerabilities thus far in 2013 – these are attacks that were entirely unknown and would therefore have likely evaded all traditional scanners, heuristics, emulators and even Virtual Execution (VX) solutions.
Symantec has added its advanced Network Threat Protection technology to the Mac version of the Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.4. “Many Mac users think they’re impervious to attacks, and as a result don’t take security seriously. But the reality is that this makes Mac users a potential goldmine for targeted attackers. Symantec’s Network Threat Protection technology intercepts incoming network traffic before it can impact the Mac computers, looking for targeted attack exploits and automatically blocking them,” said David.
Network Threat Protection technology uses a patented, application-level, protocol-aware Intrusion Prevention System to not only identify and block known attacks, but also identify and block many unknown or day-zero attacks.
Symantec also protects an organisation’s critical assets and information in the data centre. Symantec offers Symantec Critical System Protection (CSP), a server lockdown solution designed to protect both physical and virtual infrastructure. Organisations can install and configure CSP so it only allows known-legitimate activities on your servers and blocks all other (anomalous) activities. If a targeted attacker does compromise a server, they must – by definition – perform activities that will deviate from the norm in order to access sensitive data on the machine, or elsewhere in the data centre. CSP automatically detects and blocks those deviations, stopping the attack automatically. Only approved software programs are allowed to run, and those programs are only allowed to perform approved behaviors, access approved resources, etc.
In addition to these new innovative technologies, Symantec’s security solutions are powered by the Symantec Global Intelligence Network (GIN) and a team of more than 550 researchers around the world. Symantec’s GIN platform collects anonymous telemetry from Symantec’s hundreds of millions of customers and sensors around the clock. Symantec uses this data – more than 2.5 trillion rows of security telemetry – to automatically discover new attacks, and monitor attacker networks. Symantec also uses this data to develop predictive, proactive protection technologies, such as Symantec’s Insight reputation technology, for gateway, endpoint and data centre offerings.