Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 23 | Page 19

LATEST INTELLIGENCE ADVANCED ENDPOINT PROTECTION TEST REPORT CHECK POINT SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES CHECK POINT SANDBLAST AGENT NEXT GENERATION AV T he aim of this section is to verify that the AEP product is capable of detecting, preventing and continuously logging threats accurately, while remaining resistant to false positives. This section utilises real threats and attack methods that are being used by cybercriminals and other threat actors, based on attacks collected from NSS’ global threat intelligence network. PRESENTED BY Download whitepaper here The ultimate goal of any attack on a computer system is to gain access to a target host and perform an unauthorised action that results in the compromise or destruction of an asset or data. Computer systems are designed with many levels of protection to prevent unauthorised access. However, intruders may use several techniques to circumvent these protections, such as targeting vulnerable services, invoking privilege escalation, or replacing key operating system files. AEP products protect against automated and manual threats by leveraging the following key capabilities: • Inbound threat detection and prevention (prior to execution) • Execution-based threat detection and prevention (during execution) www.intelligentcio.com • Continuous monitoring post-infection and ability to act in the event of compromise (post-execution) NSS has created a unique testing infrastructure – the NSS Labs Live Testing harness, which incorporates multiple product combinations, or ‘stacks’, within the attack chain. Each stack consists of either an operating system alone or an operating system with additional applications installed (e.g. a browser, Java and Adobe Acrobat). This test harness continuously captures suspicious URLs, exploits, and malicious files from threat data generated from NSS and its customers, as well as data from opensource and commercial threat feeds. Captured malicious samples are further validated to confirm that they are malicious in nature. During testing, NSS combines its knowledge of a product’s defensive capabilities with these samples. An AEP product must be able to detect, prevent, continuously monitor and take action against threats while providing end-to-end visibility through event logs generated by the endpoint product. Each type of threat (e.g. malware, exploits, blended threats and evasions) contains unique infection vectors. This test aims to determine how effectively the AEP product can protect against a threat, regardless of infection vector or method of obfuscation. n INTELLIGENTCIO 19