Also at RSA, HP is announcing a partnership with a company called ipTrust, which maintains a database of 250 million IP addresses known to be cybersecurity threats--such as botnets or distributors of malware--and blocks them from corporate networks. TippingPoint already has a similar service, called Reputation Digital Vaccine, or RepDV, but the ipTrust deal grows the total number of IP address being tracked tenfold, he says.
HP is also introducing a Digital Vaccine Toolkit that can identify software vulnerabilities and immediately apply a "virtual patch" to temporarily protect bugs from being exploited until the IT team can conveniently take down the network to apply a permanent patch. DV Labs within Tipping Point works with software developers who report vulnerabilities and get paid for their information. DV Labs then informs software vendors, which can then develop patches.
DV Labs had been keeping news of vulnerabilities under wraps indefinitely until patches were ready, but last August it implemented a new policy that vulnerabilities would be disclosed after six months--even if there was no patch. The six months expired Feb. 7, and TippingPoint disclosed 22 vulnerabilities that software vendors hadn't patched.
However, that's just 22 out of about 190 vulnerabilities known to DV Labs back in August, so vendors managed to fix about 90 percent of the bugs in time, Callahan says. "They really embraced it," he says of the deadline that prompted vendors to act. "It was something we hoped would have happened, and it turns out it did."
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