Spirent Extends CyberFlood with Data Breach Emulation for Hyper-Realistic Security Testing of Networks and Devices

Spirent Communications,  the trusted provider of test, measurement, assurance and analytics solutions for next-generation devices and networks, today announced the availability of the first solution using data breach emulation technology to provide holistic and hyper-realistic security testing of networks and devices for awareness of data breach and intruder activity. This new solution, CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment, is a component of Spirent’s CyberFlood product line, extending it into production environments for continuous testing of live networks and devices.

As an holistic automated solution within the live network, CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment provides active monitoring and ongoing evaluations such as Purple Team assessments. Unlike testing solutions that simulate attacks, CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment uses actual attack components, true hacker activity and malware executables to assess an organization’s vulnerability to cybercrime. A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy $600 billion.

“With the ever-increasing stakes and mounting costs and penalties for a data breach, organizations must continually assess their abilities to detect an active attacker,” said David DeSanto, director, products and threat research, Spirent Communications. “Unlike existing solutions, which do not use the real methods and techniques used by real attackers, CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment uses unique data breach emulation technology to provide hyper-realistic scenarios and assessments using the actual methodologies intruders follow. This gives organizations the ability to assess their production defenses and fortify weaknesses before they are compromised by the work of an attacker.”

Emulation – A Giant Leap Beyond Simulation

CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment utilizes real traffic and activities that are indistinguishable from live efforts by cybercriminals and other malicious actors, rather than relying on replayed traffic and network activities that seem real. Security infrastructures often discount simulated, unreal artifacts, treating them as phony, non-malicious traffic, and simply pass them through or block them as invalid network streams. Such traffic cannot adequately test an organization’s defenses against cybercrime.

In contrast, Spirent has accumulated an enormous repository of real attack components, including exploits, applications, and malware. This repository, powered by Spirent TestCloud, is a combination of analysis from Spirent’s threat research team, Spirent SecurityLabs, and its partnerships within the threat intelligence community. The result puts Spirent at the forefront of the fight against cybercrime, with knowledge of the newest threats and with the broadest range of experience defending against older ones.

Multi-Tier Protection Validation

In addition to using real traffic and activities, CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment provides holistic, real-world assessments and validation because it is not limited to certain portions of a network. Attackers will choose the weakest link in an environment and move laterally to reach valuable resources, such as customer and financial data, intellectual property, and other company secrets.

To assess security accurately requires consideration of an organization’s entire environment. CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment can begin an attack or intrusion activity in any part of the environment and can pivot across multiple internal network segments. It can be deployed with physical or virtual sensors across an entire organization, including corporate and regional networks, data centers, and private and public cloud resources. It also assesses all security and networking devices involved in routing or securing traffic, or detecting malicious activity.

Automated Purple Team Assessments

The Purple Team security practice is rapidly becoming both a standard and a necessity for organizations to evaluate data breaches and attack readiness. A Purple Team assessment combines an attacking Red Team with a detecting Blue Team. The CyberFlood Data Breach Assessment solution combines Red and Blue Teams into a fully automated Purple Team capability that can be run continuously in live, production environments. Results are displayed on a dashboard and in automatically generated reports. In addition, the system can send warning messages to the security team or initiate trouble tickets to address issues and unexpected discoveries.

“Assessing data breach readiness has been expensive, time-consuming and difficult, and plagued with gaps and deficiencies,” said Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “Having the ability to use actual intruder activity on an ongoing basis to assess how live monitoring systems will perform is essential to knowing whether an organization can find an intruder before disaster strikes.”