Huntsman Security introduces the first automated threat verification to dramatically reduce time-at-risk

Huntsman, San Francisco, CA-based cybersecurity specialist to intelligence agencies in some of the world’s most demanding mission critical environments, announced on November 16 the introduction of the first vendor agnostic machine learning-based Automated Threat Verification (ATV) technology. With unprecedented levels of accuracy, Huntsman ATV automatically verifies in seconds whether reported threats are real, whether they pose an unacceptable risk to the organization, and what options are available for their mitigation. By eliminating false alarms and verifying the threats that matter, Huntsman ATV bridges the gap between detection and response by instantly sending high priority information to security analysts for their immediate attention.

“There has never been more security intelligence available to support cybersecurity specialists. The problem however is that there is a dependency on manual processing of this machine-generated information. Consequently, security specialists are struggling to isolate the real threats from the noise and valuable time is lost,” said Peter Woollacott, Huntsman’s CEO and co-founder. “In environments that generate billions of events per day, current solutions can’t scale for speedy detection or resolution. With ATV at its core the Huntsman Analyst Portal® dramatically reduces the critical delay between threat detection and resolution by focusing analyst resources on the threats that really matter.”

When compared to the timeliness of risk mitigation efforts for other business threats, Huntsman found that organizations, generally, remain exposed to cyber threats for unnecessarily long periods. This time-at-risk may be unintentional, but the implications are becoming increasingly clear. Cyber risk is no different to any other business risk and must be addressed similarly. This current extended delay, from infection to detection, is like leaving the windows and doors open in a bad neighborhood. It is highly risky and can be very costly for any organization. Huntsman ATV reduces this time-at-risk to seconds.

In May 2015, Ponemon Institute surveyed 350 companies spanning 11 countries to identify the financial risks associated with leaving a businesses exposed to threats.  The study titled, Cost of Data Breach Study: Global Analysis, found that the estimated mean time to identify threats is 206 days, with the mean time to contain them at 69 days. The average consolidated total direct and indirect costs of each data breach came to a staggering $3.8 million; representing a 23 percent increase since 2013. These delays are the result of Intelligence Overload caused by the mismatch, yet reliance, of human-scale analysis and interpretation of massive amounts of machine generated data. Huntsman ATV reduces this time-at-risk to seconds.

Huntsman Analyst Portal®, with its ATV technology, addresses this ballooning problem by eliminating false alarms and identifying only the threats that matter so analysts can quickly mitigate risks, pinpoint and isolate compromised assets and limit the time-at-risk. By streamlining routine activities and analyst workflows through automation, Huntsman Analyst Portal manages the scale of the analyst operations, simplifies their processes and frees them up to engage in the highly-skilled activities of hunting and security profiling.

“Though new to the US market, the Huntsman Security Platform has been providing machine-learning to its customers for over ten years, making it the most mature of the existing commercially available machine-based anomaly detection technologies. Strong mature detection and response technologies are drastically needed by security organizations. Those that leverage machine learning have shown the greatest effectiveness at generating actionable alerts for wide range of potential threats. Huntsman has shown an ability to reduce the delays between detection and response through both the elimination of false positives and automation of the threat management process thereby creating a huge win for overburdened response staff,” commented David Monahan, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates.

On November 3, 2015, Cisco announced the deep integration of their pxGrid technology with Huntsman Analyst Portal®.  pxGrid provides a suite of context sharing and network control capabilities that enable Cisco ecosystem partners to extend their reach into the network infrastructure and take “Rapid Threat Containment” actions.  Huntsman Security has integrated both the “User Access and Device context” and “network control” capabilities into the Huntsman Analyst Portal®, demonstrating the scale of its ATV capabilities.

“This is the cybersecurity industry’s first machine-based threat verification technology, and it’s much-needed. Detection technologies and services are becoming more and more effective at generating alerts for wide ranging potential threats, but this has resulted in increasing analyst overhead and delays from threat detection to incident response – there needed to be a way to automate analyst workflows so they can focus on what truly threatens the organization,” commented Richard Byfield, Founder & Managing Director at Datacom TSS.

Source: Huntsman Security