RedSeal Networks Upgrades Security Intelligence Software Offering

RedSeal Networks this week introduced Version 5 of its software product to proactively protect computer networks from increasing threats from cybercriminals. The upgrade monitors IT assets for key risk indicators for network security, vulnerability exposure and policy compliance, and can be managed through a customizable dashboard and a Web portal.

RedSeal says its security intelligence product protects against more sophisticated and relentless attacks known in the industry as advanced persistent threats (APTs). Despite the publicity surrounding attacks on RSA and the Sony Playstation Network, as well as attacks by "hactivists" like Anonymous that have a political agenda, many businesses remain in the dark about how vulnerable their networks are.

According to a survey conducted at tech industry events Cisco Live and BlackHat earlier this year, 56% of CISOs said they either don’t have sufficient metrics to measure security effectiveness or don’t know if those metrics even exist. RedSeal 5 is a Web-based network security performance management system that presents itself to the IT professional through an online dashboard, says Mike Lloyd, CTO for RedSeal.

Of course, people have viewed dashboards before to manage network security, but the "gauges" on those dashboards have been measuring the wrong things, says Lloyd. "It’s a count of activity, of all the processes that your people run that they record. How many times did you change the firewall? How many patches did you deploy? How many times did you update your antivirus signatures?" he says. "The problem with this approach is that you’re measuring your busyness, not your business."

Instead, RedSeal’s software measures the "risk snapshot" of the network at a glance, pinpoints where immediate corrective action is needed, identifies where network security needs to be improved, notifies of an upcoming audit and determines whether IT security investments are actually paying off. What security management tools should be doing is measuring outcomes, indicating how vulnerable the network is, and how more or less vulnerable it is compared to the past, Lloyd says.

RedSeal 5 tracks performance indicators on how well critical business assets are protected, provides visibility into the current state of security controls, validates the effectiveness of remediation and maintains compliance with security standards. The RedSeal approach ignores the vast amount of uncorrelated data from security tools such as intrusion detection systems (IDSes), security incident and event management (SIEM) products and data loss prevention (DLP) systems, says Greg Young, research VP at Gartner. Young adds that RedSeal’s solution provides better correlation of pertinent data and important context to the data.

A study conducted by Dimensional Research for RedSeal stated that 85% of security professionals in the energy industry believe that hackers have gained the upper hand in creating and automating attacks on computer systems. That figure is 84% in the government sector, 79% in the telecom industry, 71% in health care and 70% in financial services.

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