
Virsec Systems coming with a claim that it now doing some flag-waving about a radical new approach to protection that can render most other security products. It can detect attacks by understanding the intended behavior of software and identifying and blocking irregularities in a few milliseconds.
The company has been awarded 45 patents, filed for dozens more and boasts a large base of early enterprise-class customers in government, military, insurance, telecommunications and healthcare.
The industry is stuck in a response and recovery cycle that is failing to stop the growing fusillade of cyberattacks. The attacks still get through. Even if a vulnerability is known, there’s a lag time to remediate it, the job is manually intensive and it’s hard to hire people.
Virsec comes at the problem by embedding a read-only application called AppMap into memory to provide what it calls deterministic protection. The software analyzes running code to learn what permutations the software can invoke and then monitors the full operating stack to detect deviations from intended outcomes and stop them instantly.
The company says its software can stop 100% of attacks, including zero-day or previously unknown exploits, ransomware, malware and vulnerability exploits like the catastrophic Log4j exploit without patching. Virsec says its software can fix 95% of the 25 most dangerous weaknesses identified by The MITRE Corp. The 5% it can’t foil relate to missing authorizations, incorrect permissions and authentication errors.
Although the company’s approach doesn’t obviate the need for other security tools, it can significantly reduce the number of discrete products needed in the security operations center and all but eliminate alerts and responses.