IBM Announces New Threat Analytics

IBM has unveiled new analytics using advanced security intelligence that can flag suspicious behaviour in network activities to help better defend against hidden threats facing organisations.

As organisations open up their networks to smartphones and increased social media access, traditional security defences alone such as firewalls and antivirus software can’t adequately protect an organisation. According to the 2011 IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report, adversaries ramped up social engineering attacks, and X-Force witnessed mobile exploits having increased by 19 percent in 2011. Firewalls and traditional security products do little against advanced threats that use unreported techniques or that have already invaded an organisation.

To address this, IBM is announcing the QRadar Network Anomaly Detection appliance that analyses complex network activity in real-time, detecting and reporting activity that falls outside normal baseline behaviour. The analytics can look not only at inbound attacks but also can detect outbound network abnormalities where malware may have already infected a “zombie” system to send data outside the organisation.

“Advanced attackers are both patient and clever, leaving just a whisper of their presence, and evading many network protection and detection approaches,” said Marc van Zadelhoff, Vice President of Strategy and Product Management, IBM Security Systems. “Most organisations don’t even know they have been infected by malware. An advantage of IBM analytics is that it can detect the harbingers of new attacks from the outside or reveal covert malicious activity from the inside,” he added.

Using advanced behavioural algorithms, the QRadar Network Anomaly Detection appliance analyses disparate data that can collectively indicate an attack – network and traffic flows, intrusion prevention system (IPS) alerts, system and application vulnerabilities, and user activity. It quantifies several risk factors to help evaluate the significance and credibility of a reported threat, such as the business value and vulnerabilities of targeted resources.

By applying behavioural analytics and anomaly detection, the application can flag abnormal events such as outbound network traffic detected to countries where the company does not have business affairs. It can also detect FTP traffic observed in a department that doesn’t regularly use FTP services. It will pick up a known application running on a non-standard port or in areas where it is not allowed (e.g. unencrypted traffic running in secure areas of the network).

The new QRadar Network Anomaly Detection appliance leverages the QRadar Security Intelligence Platform and is designed to complement IBM SiteProtector and IBM Security Network IPS deployments. The new appliance also receives a threat intelligence feed from IBM X-Force research, providing insight into suspect entities on the Internet based upon knowledge of more than 15 billion Web pages and images. The X-Force IP Reputation Feed provides QRadar Network Anomaly Detection with a real-time list of potentially malicious IP addresses – including malware hosts, spam sources and other threats. If the product sees any traffic to or from these sites, it can immediately alert the organisation and provide rich contextual information about the activity.

Additionally, IBM has announced the newest version of its Network IPS, which contains hybrid protection, combining the broad protection found in IBM’s Protocol Analysis Engine with the open source capabilities and common rule syntax of SNORT. This functionality gives IBM clients the ability to easily create and share custom IPS rules in a popular open source format and at the same time provides the confidence that comes with IBM’s protection powered by IBM X-Force Research.

IBM has also announced its suite of network security offerings, the Advanced Threat Protection Platform. It comprises IBM Security Network IPS and IBM SiteProtector, and the new QRadar Network Anomaly Detection appliance with the new X-Force IP Reputation Feed. Users can now access X-Force intelligence through their QRadar offenses and reports to identify threats related to malicious IP addresses. The solutions also help protect against network-based threats masked in common network traffic and prevents attackers from exploiting vulnerabilities at the network, host and application layers.