Intellitactics and Secure Elements Set to Integrate Vulnerability Management with Centralized Security Operations Management
Reston, Va., September 28, 2005—Intellitactics and Secure Elements have forged a partnership to provide financial services and healthcare organizations, government agencies, and educational institutions with the ability to protect business applications and mission-critical databases from devastating attacks on information assets. The combination of products—Intellitactics’ real-time threat detection and incident escalation with Secure Elements’ policy enforcement, vulnerability assessment and management, and real-time remediation—provides an enterprise-class solution that makes IT governance a reality.
The alliance is the first to introduce to the market a combined Intellitactics Security Manager and Secure Elements C5 Enterprise Vulnerability Management (EVM) suite, giving customers the ability to vigilantly monitor both the network perimeter and enterprise applications and databases in tandem. Vulnerability assessments of enterprise applications and databases generated by the C5 EVM system are presented locally from within Intellitactics Security Manager, enabling operations to manage and act on attacks from the perimeter to the enterprise core from a single user console. By working from a central point of control, operations can accelerate launching prioritized responses during the critical early stage of an attack. Early response and automated remediation, performed by the C5 EVM suite, contains the vulnerability window, reduces the time of exposure, and ultimately reduces the time to remediate breaches of security or policy violations.
Intellitactics Security Manager consolidates and analyzes data from a host of security devices, operating systems, and applications—as well as environmental data and third-party intelligence—to provide real-time threat detection and historical analysis for compliance reporting, trend analysis, or forensics. The solution reduces a large number of events to a manageable number of higher quality alerts, elevates high-impact alerts as incidents, and provides security and network operations with the information necessary to proactively mitigate attacks and manage risk.
Secure Elements C5 EVM enables users to establish a deep inventory of network applications and databases. The system continuously monitors and compares an asset’s state against corporate policies, shows loopholes that can be easily exploited, and triggers active compliance and enforcement measures for discovered policy violations or vulnerability and compliance risk exposures. With C5 EVM, organizations can manage policies and audits, actively enforce security and usage policies, and assess and remediate vulnerabilities across all classes of IT assets. To address the assessment of known vulnerabilities, C5 EVM comes with an extensive database of known vulnerabilities and their associated remediation steps, including configuration changes and automated installation of application or operating system patches.
The joint offering of security information and event management from Intellitactics and vulnerability management from Secure Elements addresses the need for companies to automatically determine the vulnerability and criticality of an individual asset, correlate an asset’s business value with threat levels, and prioritize responses during the critical early stage to prevent attack propagation—all while adhering to corporate policies and government compliance mandates.
“Organizations face a dual challenge in regard to network and application security that includes both trusted insiders and external attackers,” explains Scott Crawford, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. “The majorities of large corporations are over reliant upon perimeter security and are extremely vulnerable. To combat the threat from within and without, perimeter security must be supplemented with internal controls and asset-based security technologies. The problem is twofold. First, organizations grant partners and customers access to business applications, and in doing so they create extended networks that include a vast number of devices over a wide geographical base. As the size and complexity of these extended networks increases, organizations begin to lose real-time situational awareness of the hygiene and security of their various technology assets. Second, attacks are becoming increasingly more sophisticated, coordinated, and insidious. Cyber criminals have moved beyond the nuisance attack and are directly targeting the enterprise applications and databases where valuable data is stored with the end-goal of financial gain. By combining information about perimeter attacks with enterprise vulnerability management focused on applications and databases, Intellitactics and Secure Elements provide an organization with the technology and practices necessary to achieve a substantially higher level of reliable IT governance.”
According to Gartner, “As cyber attackers become more efficient at quickly exploiting software vulnerabilities, IT security managers need current information about the external threat environment. Vulnerability management products must factor near-real-time threat information into vulnerability prioritization and alert functions.”
“When you consider that an enterprise typically generates millions of event per day from a diverse and growing number of security devices, having information that helps you focus on the high-impact attacks by targeting critical assets represents a significant benefit to a company in terms of performance and productivity,” explains Ron Hardy, chief strategy officer at Intellitactics. “The C5 EVM product continually performs non-intrusive compliance and vulnerability checks of the network and fingerprints all assets and databases down to the patch level. In addition, it monitors and documents systems configuration changes. By integrating C5 EVM with Security Manager, our customers now have all they need to know at their fingertips—from edge to core and out to remote laptops.”
“The escalating state of cyber-threats is driving the need for real-time situational awareness,” comments Ned Miller, chief executive officer at Secure Elements. “The combination of our deep asset knowledge from hosts inside the perimeter with knowledge acquired from the perimeter provides a level of insight that is a required in today’s risk adverse world. Given regulatory and compliance drivers across the industry, this solution is both timely and necessary.”
Intellitactics and Secure Elements will jointly develop the technology that will integrate the C5 EVM with Intellitactics Security Manager. The two companies will also create a seamless workflow enabling the operator to receive information about vulnerabilities and actions automatically executed by C5 EVM, such as the application of known patches. Alternatively, the operator will be able to drill down on vulnerability notices to analyze the detail, assess remediation options in real-time, and, if necessary, instruct C5 EVM to execute appropriate countermeasures such as disabling a user account, shutting down a service or a machine, or blocking an IP address. The new offering is planned for a Spring 2006 release.
About Intellitactics, Inc.
Intellitactics, provider of the premier Security Information Management solution for the largest, most challenging environments in the world, was founded in 1996. Its industry-leading Intellitactics Security Manager enables security teams to rapidly and comprehensively identify information security incidents, deploy resources on threats that pose the greatest risk to the business, assess and resolve those incidents providing the security team productivity and capability to affordably scale security coverage enterprise-wide. Intellitactics is the enterprise security management software of choice for the world’s leading companies, government organizations and managed security service providers. Intellitactics is backed by JMI Equity Fund LP and Lazard Technology Partners. (www.intellitactics.com)
About Secure Elements
Secure Elements, a leader in enterprise vulnerability management and compliance risk reduction solutions, automates security remediation strategies and tactics across the entire enterprise, reducing business risk and IT management costs while improving systems performance and maintaining business continuity. Protecting mission critical and network infrastructure assets from both known and unknown attacks without limiting operational performance, the company rapidly identifies and intelligently responds to complex and diverse security incidents. Using real-time threat intelligence data and analysis, Secure Elements provides administrators with optimal security control across the enterprise. Based in Herndon, Virginia, Secure Elements serves organizations in the federal government and critical infrastructure markets, as well as Global 1000 corporations. (www.secure-elements.com)