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Corporate Backgrounder

Overview

Today’s enterprise business environment has been built on a foundation of increasingly complex networks. And, with the fear of a breach and potential losses measured in billions, securing those networks has reached a new level of urgency.

Hackers are attacking with increasing frequency and sophistication, targeting mission-critical custom applications and corporate assets. As these attacks spread globally, no network is immune. Applications that run enterprises, connect partners, and communicate with customers are in imminent danger. And with seventy-five percent of attacks tunneling in through applications, and others through breaches of firewalls and network intrusion detection systems, there is a real need for an innovative, cost effective new approach to application security.

Sana Security delivers solutions that meet this need—conquering the complexity and cost escalation faced by enterprise security managers with products that provide simple and effective protection for all applications, on all platforms, against all attacks.

Market Opportunity

Cybercrime is skyrocketing despite increased spending on security measures. IT is now a strategic business imperative, and securing today’s dynamic web-based and networked business applications as they increase in complexity and scale is an intimidating challenge. Adding to this challenge is the fact that insider attacks are growing even faster than external threats. With growing pressure to reduce IT costs, and increasing dependence on scarce security expertise, many enterprise security managers feel these challenges are insurmountable.

The numbers tell it all. Reported security incidents are growing exponentially, from roughly 9,000 in 1999 to more than 110,000 in 2002. The Computer Security Institute estimates that the cost of computer crimes is increasing more than 39 percent every year. And, because only 42 percent of enterprises reporting computer crimes are able to quantify their losses, these numbers are clearly conservative, with actual costs likely to be much higher.

According to the Institute, 70% of electronic attacks are a consequence of opening up extranets to suppliers, partners and customers. The soaring number of security breaches come at a time when companies are spending more money than ever before on security. The Information Security survey found that the number of companies spending more than $1 million annually on computer security nearly doubled in the last year, with security budgets up an average of 188 percent over the last two years, as well.

With the high costs of competitive solutions, and limited availability of skilled security experts, Sana Security is confident that more automated, accurate and cost-effective approaches to addressing these problems will win the approval, and IT budget dollars, of enterprise security managers.

Competitive Solutions Don’t Measure Up

Today’s second-generation host-based intrusion detection systems (HIDS) rely on signature-based approaches that require constant updating by security experts. First-generation HIDS products only detect attacks, but do nothing to prevent them, while generating substantial volumes of false positive alerts, wasting valuable time and resources.

On the other hand, network intrusion detection systems (NIDS) protect only the network perimeter, leaving critical applications completely vulnerable. Adding to the problem is the increasing use of encrypted communications that render NIDS useless, because they cannot scan packet contents.

Other approaches only protect web servers, leaving critical applications vulnerable to attack. Finally, security solution providers and independent software vendors offer bundled solutions that do not offer the kind of specialized application security management products that are critical to protecting enterprise networks.

In viewing the competitive landscape, one thing is clear: there is a critical need for a host-based application security solution that both detects and prevents damage from internal and external threats, before and after data has been decrypted.

The Sana Security Solution: Inspired by the Human Immune System

While working toward his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of New Mexico, Sana Security founder Steven Hofmeyr, Ph.D. conceived of a unique concept for securing networks against attacks: Why not look to the human immune system, and its incredible powers of adaptation, for inspiration? The seeds of what would become Sana Adaptive Profiling Technology (SanAPT) were planted.

Much like the human immune system identifies and responds to attack, SanAPT learns normal program behavior by observing code paths in running programs. Vulnerabilities, in the form of software bugs, misconfigurations, injected code and other forms of attack, force applications down unexpected code paths. SanAPT immediately identifies these anomalous code paths as being outside of normal network behavior, and stops them by blocking system call executions.

SanAPT is a completely new approach to application security that effectively protects standard, complex and custom server applications on major platforms. And, because SanAPT is continually learning, it also adapts to legitimate changes within a network, producing minimal false positives, even as applications are updated and customized. Further, SanAPT has demonstrated its effectiveness against standard, complex and custom server application attacks, both known and unknown, across major platforms, independent of any specific server configuration. With simplified management controls, SanAPT requires minimal network security skills.