According to Frost and Sullivan, global spending on intrusion detection and prevention technologies in 2010 exceeded $ 1.5 billion USD. At the same time, organizations are growing increasingly concerned by attack sophistication, such as Stuxnet, APTs, and the recent incidents involving RSA and Comodo. Yet, what if the first factor was rendered completely ineffective, and the second increased in its success? If all that money goes down the drain due to ineffective technologies, and sophistication is increasing, what do we do next?
Last October, Stonesoft made friends and enemies alike with its announcement regarding research in advanced evasion techniques and their disclosure to CERT-FI for vulnerability coordination. The subsequent disclosure at RSA that an additional 124 techniques were disclosed on top of the original 23 was met with even more resounding silence.
What’s interesting is that all of the discussion focuses around irrelevant sidebars. Bob Walder of Gartner and NSS Labs have discounted the threat of AETs as “yesterday’s news”; after all, evasions aren’t new, so what’s the big deal? And granted, Bob does know a thing or two about evasions; as one of the founders of NSS Labs, he’s a pretty sharp guy and created a few evasions of his own back in the day. The second sidebar centers around the likelihood of AETs being seen in the wild. No one has heard or seen of them being used, so clearly they must not exist.
Yet I would say that these are distractions from the real issue: old or new, in use or not, the bottom line is : advanced evasion techniques work. They work against just about every IPS technology on the market and in your network today. They enable the delivery of any exploit to vulnerable systems at any time, without detection or notice. But don’t take our word for it. Contact us and we’ll be happy to demonstrate for you. Read the validation of third party testing. Or even better, test it yourself. We’ve now made the first AET samples, originally provided to CERT-FI last year available at www.antievasion.com.
Does it matter how old it is? No, unlike a fine wine, AETs don’t get better or worse with age. They simply are. They work.
And in most cases, they work well. Against any IPS technology, next generation firewall, content scanning system, or Web application firewall. Why? Because vendors have typically focused on providing you, the customer, with what you ask for rather than what you need. They design systems that favor performance shortcuts vs. real security. They’d rather invest in nice marketing materials than in an effective normalization engine that still maintains decent throughput.
Wouldn’t you rather have a vendor interested in making a better, more effective security technology for today’s threats? One that is more manageable, scalable, and simplified than what you’re doing now? Again, don’t take our word for it. Try it yourself. Learn why Stonesoft’s security solutions are:
Network Security. Simplified.
written by markb - 723 views
\\ tags: AET, evasion, Intrusion, IPS, stonegate, stonesoft
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