NETSCOUT expands security monitoring capabilities, releases Omnis Cyber Intelligence

Cybersecurity provider NETSCOUT has announced the availability of Omnis Cyber Intelligence, a scalable network security software solution.

The solution detects and investigates suspicious activities in real-time and retrospectively identifies threats early in the attack life cycle to prevent infections from spreading, stops future attacks, and identifies compromised assets.

With cyberattacks increasing and breaches making front-page news, IT security teams find that their existing tools are no match for this growing threat, and both their expenses and their cyber risk are growing out of control. This is the case because the typical data sets feeding these tools are reactive, not granular, and do not extend to the earliest indications of a potential attack.

NETSCOUT's approach to turn the situation around is to leverage its market-leading visibility technology to increase the range and depth of security intelligence and make it accessible to security teams in real-time. The solution consists of an analytics stack and cyber security software sensors called Omnis CyberStreams.

Sanjay Munshi, vice president, product management at NETSCOUT, says enterprises have invested heavily in cybersecurity solutions, but they are largely ineffective because they lack the actionable visibility needed to spot attacks before they have broad impact.

"As attack surfaces expand, the Omnis Cyber Intelligence solution extends throughout the infrastructure, integrates into existing ecosystems, and becomes part of the growing movement towards XDR, using meaningful metadata, or smart data, and powerful cyber analytics to quickly get to the root cause of the cybersecurity issue and mitigate risk," he says.

NETSCOUT's Omnis Cyber Intelligence arms security teams with proactive, actionable intelligence helping them to:

• Perform continuous scanning and analysis for reconnaissance to detect attacks earlier, minimising exposure and, in many cases, thwarting the threat 
• Rapidly access high-resolution historical evidence far back in time to understand how an attack started to prevent similar breaches and stop ongoing malicious activity 
• Monitor exposed attack surfaces within their infrastructure to optimise the effectiveness of the defences deployed 
• Evaluate the extent of penetration and impacted assets when attacks occur to prevent malware from spreading 
• Deploy on-premises, in virtualised data centers, and the public cloud, supporting an organisation's evolving deployment preferences without impacting security governance and workflows 
• Integrate with their security ecosystem through APIs and partnerships with vendors such as Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and AWS

As a result, the effectiveness of customers' existing security tools and the productivity of analysts improve, and they can get ahead of the vicious cycle of both rising costs and rising cyber risk.

"NETSCOUT's unique ASI technology allows companies to truly unlock the actionable intelligence embedded in network transactions and packets," says Christopher Kissel, research director, security and trust products, at analyst firm IDC.

"Where others have failed, NETSCOUT has made the use of packet data fast and affordable with their patented metadata extraction, intelligent reduction, and indexing. Omnis Cyber Intelligence provides security analysts with the information they need to quickly and accurately assess the scope and scale of an incident and reduce the associated risk and negative impact."