SecPoint Security in Virtualized Environments

A while ago Victor Christiansenn, CEO of SecPoint, let me know that the company was making a number of its security products available in the form of VMware virtual machine images.

Here's what SecPoint has to say:

SecPoint, one of Europe's leading security systems providers, has made its flagship products available virtually as VMware images, doing away with the requirement for dedicated hardware...

Administrators who require advanced protection for corporate systems against hackers and malicious software can now download Secpoint's products rather than buy and install hardware versions.

Major benefits of using SecPoint's products via VMware include free demo testing, instant downloads, lower entry costs and a centralised marketplace...

The first products to be available virtually from SecPoint include:

The Penetrator Vulnerability Scanner

This is an advanced penetration testing system for corporate IT clients. SecPoint's Penetrator guards against the most common attacks to large-scale businesses, including SQL injection and Cross Site Scripting via its automatic crawl engine as well as scanning for Web Application Firewalls.

Protector UTM Anti Spam Anti Virus

The Protector enables corporate customers to protect their businesses from escalating network threats at a time when the volume, severity and sophistication of attacks have never been greater. The security suite includes a firewall, intrusion detection system, network access control, spam filtering, anti-virus protection and web filtering, protecting data centres and larger networks in real-time.

Portable Penetrator Wifi Security wepcrack wpacrack

The Portable Penetrator Wi-Fi Audit system can keep corporate networks secure against external attack, allowing browser-based wireless vulnerability scanning of very large networks across hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously. It can also crack security keys encrypted with WEP, WPA or WPA2.

The Penetrator provides the names of all identified networks in range, their types of encryption, signal strengths and their number of connected users. Administrators can then launch a wide variety of attacks, including denial of service, against any of these networks. The latest version includes more than 50 languages and can run 250 keys per second across a WPA-encrypted network, until the password is identified. It can now identify more than 42,000 remote unique security vulnerabilities.

Snapshot analysis

Security is often an after-the-fact consideration. That means that workloads and applications are designed and security is addressed only after all of the functions work. Most security experts, howevver, would point out that security systems work best when they are "baked in" at the time of application design not afterward.

Victor Christiansenn of SecPoint made a very good point when he said that the first step anyone should take to secure their business is to do a risk assessment to identify threats and vulnerabilities to their IT infrastructure. This knowledge is really important if developers are going to be able to build hardened applications and workloads.

SecPoint, however, is not the first company to offer security products that are encapsulated in virtual machines. Catbird has been offering its products this way for a number of years. Quite a number of other security software companies are too.

I'm looking forward to learning more about SecPoint and will post here when I do.