US firm launches digital vaccine for networks

Digital Vaccine Laboratories (DVLabs), a team of international experts analysing and discovering vulnerability for US-based network-security solution provider TippingPoint, has developed a digital vaccine that works as an antivirus signature providing all types of security throughout a network.

The vaccine is released to customers automatically, at least twice a week.

DVLabs' director Rohit Dhamankar said that to continually develop and upgrade the vaccine, the company is fed information from its monitor server called Light House, located throughout the world.

"Digital vaccines are delivered to customers twice a week, or immediately when critical vulnerabilities and threats emerge, and can be deployed automatically with no user interaction required," Dhamankar said.

DVLabs claims to represent a benchmark in vulnerability and security research. Its work provides the security intelligence behind TippingPoint s products.

New filters are continuously fed to the new intrusion-prevention system to keep it up-to-date against the latest vulnerabilities. Each filter can be thought of as a virtual Software patch that is created within a network to protect downstream hosts from attack.

Any malicious traffic intended to exploit a particular vulnerability is immediately detected and blocked. The solution is highly scalable in that the intrusion-prevention system can protect thousands of unpatched systems with a single virtual patch.

It provides customers with real-time threat and filter data to designate security-policy changes as required across TippingPoint's intrusion-prevention systems.

Recently, TippingPoint launched Web-application digital-vaccine services to address the security threat posed by Web applications. They aim to help customers to maximise their security investments while reducing the risk of attacks through custom-built Web applications.

TippingPoint has also been placed by IT research and advisory company Gartner in the Leaders Quadrant in the Network Intrusion Prevention System Appliances Magic Quadrant i report.

Its intrusion-prevention system protects against internal and external cyber attacks that may threaten critical infrastructures, including worms, viruses, Trojans, DDoS, spyware, P2P, Web-application vulnerabilities and supervisory control and data acquisition.