ShieldX adds lateral movement prevention to the Elastic Security Platform for AWS
ShieldX, the leader in elastic security, announced the addition of lateral movement prevention to the ShieldX Elastic Security Platform for AWS. Also known as East-West security, enterprises can now for the first time monitor and prevent lateral movement inside the AWS public cloud to complement ShieldX’s existing capability for VMWare ESXi and Microsoft Azure.
This eliminates a significant management and security challenge, by providing a full range of security controls including visibility into the movement of attacks and data between applications within the cloud.
Until now, AWS users had the ability to monitor traffic in and out of their environment but had no visibility to see how threats spread between assets within the environment. ShieldX’s security capabilities provide users the ability to view traffic, identify anomalies and block attacks inside AWS VPCs and subnets.
It also vastly improves the company’s leading microsegmentation capabilities by giving the industry’s only option in AWS to help enterprises eliminate a flat network and perform threat prevention with deep packet inspection as organizations move to the public cloud.
“The best security tool or response suite in the world is useless if the network administrators and security team have to protect everything all the time,” said Chase Cunningham, Forrester analyst in The Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem: Networks, January 2019.
“Segmentation is a necessary part of basic network architecture, and the ability to be as granular as possible in relation to application needs, user access, and data repositories are key pieces of microsegmentation for Zero Trust. All networks are hybrid in some fashion or form in today’s enterprises, and only with microsegmentation technologies can any security team have a hope of staying ahead of the threat.
Today’s cyber-attacks are no longer smash and grab incidents — adversaries are now intending to dwell within networks for a long time. FireEye’s 2017 M-Trends report noted, “An often overlooked fundamental, lack of segmentation leads to easy lateral movement by attackers.”
On hacker forums as well as publicly available open source forums, toolkits exist to help to aid white and black hats execute or avoid lateral movement. At Black Hat in 2017, security researcher Tal Be’ery explained how lateral movement was experiencing an “industrial revolution.”
“Most lateral movement detection hasn’t evolved for cloud-based deployments nor for ones that span the multi cloud. Because of this lack of visibility, organizations have been hesitant to move sensitive data to AWS,” explained ShieldX CTO Manuel Nedbal.
“Until this release, organizations could not detect or block lateral movement in AWS and with this functionality we are enabling companies to fully embrace the advantages of the cloud without compromising on security controls.”
With the new release, security teams with enterprise data centers in AWS can track and monitor for:
- Exploits used by attackers or worms
- Propagation of malware
- Anomalous behavior of workloads
- Sensitive data movement and anomalies thereof
- Indicator Of Pivot to indicate successful breaches and prevent further spread
ShieldX develops and delivers innovative new capabilities designed for the dynamic nature of the cloud. With experts dedicated to cloud innovation, ShieldX’s veteran research and development team has filed 22 patent applications.
To date, six patents have been granted. Users can leverage ShieldX’s patented technology to automatically identify and implement the security policies for essential controls—including microsegmentation, threat prevention, firewall, malware detection and lateral movement prevention—across multi-cloud environments.
In addition, ShieldX continues to gain recognition in the security market, from its 5 Star rating in SC Media to its most recent 5 Star end user recognition in ITCentralStation.