HITS
NSS Labs Expands Research Offerings with New Breach Prevention System Test (HITS)
Story Highlights
NSS Labs released a new technology overview and a “Call-to-Test” for Breach Prevention Systems. Breach Detection Systems (BDS) have been deployed to provide enhanced detection of advanced malware, zero-day attacks, and targeted attacks to combat more skilled threat actors who are capable of evading traditional security technologies. Now breach detection technology is giving rise to Breach Prevention Systems (BPS) to defend against these more advanced attacks. This new market of BPS offerings has Enterprise IT organizations seeking information to help select the solution that reduces their risk exposure.
The ultimate goal of a BPS offering is to prevent a breach — loss of data, sabotage, or an exfiltration event — from occurring. Through advanced technologies including wirespeed forensics, sandboxing, emulation, malware analysis, machine learning, and iterative heuristics, these systems provide a new level of security. Breach prevention offerings can be deployed either at the perimeter of a network or within a segment to analyze traffic in real-time and determine whether sufficient malicious indicators exist as evidence to achieve a conviction and protect against any data loss.
A major challenge in the adoption of these systems is the lack of information in key areas such as security effectiveness, false positive rates, performance capacity, and the impact to user experience. The scope of the test will include:
Security effectiveness
Resistance to evasion
Stability
Performance
Total cost of ownership (TCO)
“The level of sophistication that threat actors are employing to penetrate traditional security systems has created the need for advanced breach prevention technology,” said Mike Spanbauer, NSS Labs VP of Security, Test & Advisory. “Enterprise customers realize that there is a trade-off to the overall performance as you increase the level of security. Understanding this impact and the overall TCO so decisions around capacity planning can be made is our goal in this test.”
