Invincea Expands Malware Threat Protection To Include Email Attachments

The most likely source of infection in any enterprise is its weakest link -- the user.

That's the theory behind the latest round of enhancements coming out of Invincea, which makes malware threat detection tools that are capable of detecting and mitigating both old and new threats.

"End users are the largest uncontrolled threat in any enterprise," says Anup Ghosh, founder and CEO of Invincea, citing examples such as last year's RSA breach, which began with a single user clicking on an infected email attachment. "In an increasing number of attacks, the target is the end user because they are the ones who are most likely to infect the whole network."

Invincea has expanded its product suite to address emerging vectors of attacks against users, Ghosh says. Its anti-malware technology can now capture and contain the primary attack vehicles used in spear-phishing, poisoned search results, and other user-initiated infections.

"As a result, even the most well-crafted phishing attempts using zero-day malware are contained before they can successfully take root in the end-user system, preventing the adversary from infiltrating the network," the company says.

Attackers have expanded their repertoire of delivery tools to include content such as Microsoft Excel and Word files, as well as .zip and disguised executable files, Invincea notes. The company's initial tools protected only against attacks via Web browsing and PDF documents.

Invincea BrowserProtection and DocumentProtection have been extended to capture and contain potential threats within any Microsoft Office File, .zip, or executable type file, the company says.

Increasing Invincea’s Threat Data Server capability has also been extended to correlate and share forensic data on captured malicious content with internal and external threat intelligence sources, such as security information and event management (SIEM) systems and log management systems.

Using behavior-based detection, Invincea is able to detect and quarantine all malicious activity -- including zero-day exploits -- to a contained virtual environment. At the point of detection, Invincea automatically captures detailed forensics on malicious activity from the virtual machine and feeds that actionable intelligence to the Invincea Threat Data Server for correlation and further analysis. The content within the infected bubble is automatically and immediately destroyed and replaced with a clean environment.

"This will help enterprises protect themselves against user-generated infections, including those that come from using Twitter or Facebook," Ghosh says. "It lets users do what they want in a safe environment."

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