Trend Micro is introducing Custom Defense – an advanced threat protection solution that enables businesses and government agencies not only to detect and analyze APTs and targeted attacks, but also to adapt their protection and respond to these attacks.


Today's most damaging attacks are those targeted specifically at an organization – its people, its systems, its vulnerabilities, and its data. Stealthier and more sophisticated than ever, cybercriminals use clever social engineering techniques like spear phishing to quietly penetrate select organizations, deploying customized malware that can live undetected for months within an organization.

Cybercriminals can remotely and covertly steal an organization's valuable information – from credit card data to the more lucrative intellectual property or government secrets – potentially destroying an organization's competitive advantage, or in the case of government even putting national security at risk.

While many organizations feel that they have been targeted, 67 percent admit that their current security activities are insufficient to stop a targeted attack.1 Not surprisingly, 55 percent are not even aware of intrusions2, and fewer know the extent of the attack or who exactly is behind it.

While necessary to thwart the majority of today's attacks, standard defenses have proven insufficient to handle APTs and targeted attacks; a custom attack requires a custom defense. Trend Micro's Custom Defense solution enables a complete Detect – Analyze – Adapt – Respond lifecycle.

Custom Defense goes beyond the ability to just detect and analyze targeted attacks by blocking and shutting them down before the real damage occurs. This comprehensive solution also delivers custom insight about the specific threat and cybercriminals involved, empowering organizations with the information they need to fight back against their attackers.

How it works:

Detect

At the heart of the Custom Defense solution is a specialized threat protection platform that performs network-wide monitoring to detect zero-day malware, malicious communications and attacker behaviors that are invisible to standard security defenses. Uniquely integrated with control points across the network, the solution can detect and block attacks occurring via corporate and personal email, social media applications, mobile devices and more. It can also detect and block malware communications back to the cybercriminal, or attempts to move laterally to other valuable systems within the network.

Custom Defense solution allows for multiple, customer-defined sandboxes that better reflect their real-life environment and allow them to determine whether they have been breached. The Custom Defense sandbox detonates suspect code in a safe, controlled environment that can be optimized for performance and to evade hacker techniques that are on the lookout for sandboxing solutions.

Analyze

Upon detection, the Custom Defense solution best enables organizations to profile in depth the risk, origin and characteristics of the attack, and uniquely delivers actionable intelligence that guides the organization on how to contain and remediate the attack. To aid in the threat investigation, this solution offers a customized view of threat intelligence that is specific to the organization's environment, and offers the ability to tap into the power of a global, cloud-based threat intelligence network.

Adapt

To immediately adapt and strengthen protection against further attacks, the Custom Defense solution helps customers create custom responses to these targeted attacks, such as IP blacklists, custom spear phishing protection, and coming soon, custom signatures - all specific to each attack.

The solution automatically updates the global threat intelligence network and issues these custom security updates to Trend Micro gateway, endpoint and server enforcement points. Built using an open and extensible platform, the solution can also send security updates to non-Trend Micro security products that may already be an important part of an organization's defense in-depth strategy.

Respond

Finally, the solution delivers 360-degree contextual visibility of the attack, arming the organization with the insight needed to respond to their specific attackers. The solution can deliver insight such as what information is being targeted, how the attack works, who the attacker is, and perhaps most importantly, who is actually sponsoring the attack.

How the organization responds depends on its own situation, and could be as simple as evasive action to make it difficult for the attacker to continue, but could also include public exposure of the attacker to discredit him or her in the cyber community, or even legal action against the attacker and sponsor.