HP has announced enhancements to the HP TippingPoint Reputation Digital Vaccine (RepDV) service that protects enterprises from the latest security risks by providing greater visibility into malicious activity on corporate networks. HP TippingPoint launched the Rep DV service last June to deliver current lists of malicious or suspicious websites to customer-deployed TippingPoint IPS solutions and automatically block traffic to and from these sites. The list is updated every 2 hours and is powered by HP's Digital Vaccine Labs (DVLabs), a security research and development organization.
In addition to the currently available third-party and proprietary feeds of suspicious web activity, HP TippingPoint has integrated a new intelligence service from ipTrust. This new feed increases the overall list of RepDV sources tenfold to more than 250 million web addresses. ipTrust analyzes and classifies sources of dangerous online activity to offer reputation analytics.
The ipTrust security intelligence feeds complement the RepDV threat database with expanded visibility into malicious software called "botnets" and malware activity on corporate networks. This new integration is "just another line of defense, an additional feed, into an already good technology and something that we are confident is going to make it even better," Dan Holden, director, DVLabs at HP TippingPoint, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
The HP TippingPoint IPS contains thousands of filters that block a wide range of threats across popular third-party applications, including those from Microsoft, Adobe and RealNetworks. All publicly disclosed vulnerabilities discovered by TippingPoint DVLabs researchers are listed on the DVLabs website. In addition, HP has announced the new TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Toolkit (DVToolkit), which enables clients to create unique Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) filters to protect custom applications.
For organizations with these custom applications, such as financial services firms that develop in-house analytical software, the HP TippingPoint DVToolkit extends protection to their entire environment by providing an easy-to-use wizard that allows clients to quickly create custom filters for their HP TippingPoint IPS solution. These filters, specific to a client's in-house applications, block malicious traffic from attacking the network while ensuring ongoing permitted communications.
The reason that this important is that there are so many commercial applications - "and we are always providing protection for those - but you also have this other category where there may be classified applications or they may be proprietary or confidential, and so the discovery of vulnerabilities in those systems is typically within the walls of the business," notes Michael Callahan, director of network security solutions and marketing for TippingPoint, HP. "But just because they are within the walls of the business does not mean they are not susceptible to being hacked."
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