McAfee has announced enhancements to its Network Security Platform. The latest release of McAfee Network Security Platform includes enhanced botnet control through reputation intelligence, virtual network inspection and a traffic analysis port for network monitoring, forensics and other advanced analysis engines.
In the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network IPS, Gartner states, “As vulnerability research has improved, the gap between vulnerability exploitation and IPS signatures to protect that vulnerability has closed. Future protection improvements of significance will come from bringing intelligence into the IPS from external sources instead – points the IPS does not normally have visibility within.”
Real-time, reputation-based intelligence through McAfee Global Threat Intelligence provides McAfee Network Security Platform users with additional context for enforcing network security policies, not to mention faster, more accurate threat detection.
The latest release of McAfee Network Security Platform includes:
- Enhanced botnet control: File and network connection reputation feeds from cloud-based McAfee Global Threat Intelligence allows Network Security Platform to perform in-line botnet prevention based on over 60 million malware samples and the reputation of hundreds of millions of network connections based on over two billion IP reputation queries each month. This external intelligence provides vital context for faster, more accurate detection and prevention.
- Traffic analysis port: Traffic redirect capabilities allow arbitrary network traffic to be subjected to additional inspection by McAfee and third party products, including data loss prevention, network forensics and advanced malware analysis tools.
- Virtual network inspection: Enables the Network Security Platform sensors to examine inter virtual machine traffic on virtual environments and provide attack detection for virtual data center environments. Network Security Platform can inspect traffic both within virtual environments and between virtual and physical environments, giving organizations the same level of visibility regardless of where the traffic flows.
As enterprises consolidate data centers, adopt cloud-services, and virtualize critical infrastructure they need a way to unify security management across physical and virtual infrastructures. In partnership with Reflex Systems, a player in virtualization management solutions and McAfee brings its threat detection and security management to virtual environments.
“Virtualization is becoming a standard part of every enterprise data center infrastructure – be it in-house or in the cloud – and organizations are recognizing that they must extend enterprise-class security and management into the virtual environment,” said Preston Futrell, President and CEO of Reflex Systems. “We are pleased to partner with McAfee to help customers seamlessly integrate virtualization security and management into their existing security infrastructure, systems and best-practices.”
Together, McAfee and Reflex Systems will offer integrated virtual and physical security and management that enables customers to holistically monitor and understand security issues, easily apply best practices, and provide comprehensive reporting for compliance purposes across the current and next generation data center infrastructure.
“When building out Savvis’ enterprise cloud offerings, it was imperative that we base our cloud architecture on a strong security foundation with the right tools to provide customers piece of mind as they begin leveraging new cloud technologies in the data center,” said Ken Owens, Savvis technical vice president for security and virtualization technologies. “Bringing together two best-of-breed solutions like Reflex and McAfee to meet the unique, dynamic security and management challenges in both the physical and virtual infrastructure will go a long way in helping accelerate the adoption of virtualization and cloud technology.”