Lancope enhances forensics and incident response

Lancope, Inc. unveils new, user-centric monitoring capabilities for streamlined forensics and incident response. The new features, which enable administrators to investigate network behaviours and anomalies based on user names, significantly enhance Lancope’s network protection against both sophisticated, targeted attacks and insider threats.

“Lancope’s StealthWatch® System leverages network flow data to deliver actionable security intelligence for combating today’s top threats,” said Kerry Armistead, vice president of product management for Lancope. “As the threat landscape becomes more complex, we continue to innovate to help organisations make immediate sense of the plethora of data available on the network. Our new, user-centric functionality provides an additional means of querying, searching and reporting on flow data to increase network visibility and reduce enterprise risk.”

Identity awareness has long been a cornerstone of Lancope’s early threat detection capabilities. StealthWatch users can obtain identity data from either the StealthWatch IDentity™ appliance or the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). By uncovering both the user causing an event and the other users affected, StealthWatch provides greater accountability and immediate insight into network issues.

With new, user-centric monitoring features, network and security teams can now run flow queries and reports based on user names versus just IP addresses. Administrators can also search on user names, as well as obtain a User Snapshot outlining a specific person’s network activity – including any anomalous behavior or alarms triggered. These new capabilities are invaluable for combating the growing rise in insider threats, as well as for improving incident response, forensics and audit controls for regulatory compliance.

“Building on the premise that enterprise networks are likely already compromised, Lancope’s StealthWatch System is designed to detect and halt attacks inside the network, allowing remedial actions to be taken before they escalate into major issues,” said Javvad Malik, senior analyst at The 451 Group. “As advanced attacks continue to infiltrate perimeter defenses, behavioural-based network monitoring solutions like StealthWatch are becoming increasingly valuable, especially when bolstered by additional functionality like identity awareness.”

Insider attacks, in particular, can be difficult to differentiate from legitimate network transactions and are often not detected by signature-based security systems. External attackers are also increasingly using social engineering tactics and stolen credentials to bypass perimeter defenses and gain access to the internal network. The only way to prevent insider threats is to have visibility into what users are doing on the network so that suspicious behavior can be identified and further investigated.